Supernatural: The End
by notmanos
Summary: The Season 10 cliffhanger has occurred - what's next? Dean and Sam have to deal with a very changed world, and fix something that they have broken, if it's even remotely possible to fix it. Like all things, it comes with a great cost. Is this the end of the Winchesters? And is there anything left worth fixing?
1. The Beginning of the End

_**N.B. So, Supernatural has limped to a close, and once again, I find myself underwhelmed, and a little upset. Yes, the show has been on way too long, but it can be a whole lot better than it is. So, between more "serious" writing, I decided to write my own fanfic, fixing the problem, and giving everyone an idea how I'd end Supernatural. You probably don't care. But if you do, here it is. (Yes, these aren't my characters. it's fanfic, you know the drill.)  
(Season ten spoilers, obviously.)**_

 _ **1 – The Beginning of the End**_

Even before he fully regained consciousness, Dean knew something was wrong. The hell of it was, he didn't know what.

He wasn't in pain, which was the first thing he noticed. If he wasn't, that was good, right? But it was weird. He thought he should be. Why? His mind scrabbled around in the dark as he forced his body to start moving, as usually he could jump start his consciousness through action. He'd done it a million times before. Too damn many.

Finally he opened his eyes, and realized he was looking out the windshield of the Impala, which had hairline cracks in it. Internally he groaned that Baby was hurt, but it could have been worse. He'd replaced the windshield before. Beyond the glass was an overgrown field, giving him no sense of place.

Except …

Now it came flooding back, a nightmare replaying itself in the light of day. Had he actually killed Death? He had, to save Sam, and then the Mark of Cain was removed, and all hell broke loose… literally. Again! He remembered a dark cloud enveloping the car, and a coldness that seemed to get sucked into his lungs, freezing him from the inside out, and then ..?

He looked over to the passenger side, and saw Sam slumped there, head against the window. "Sam," Dean said. He was surprised at how rough his voice sounded, as if he'd been screaming. "Sammy?" He shook his arm, but that just caused him to slide forward, sinking deeper into his sag.

Dean grabbed him and pulled him back, suddenly horrified. After all this, was he dead? Did this stupid whatever the fuck kill him, after he killed death to save him? Son of a bitch. He put his fingers on his throat, searching for a pulse, and his skin was so cold adrenaline spiked through Dean. No, no no no no …

Sam suddenly straightened up, coming to with a slight gasp. "What the hell ..?" He looked around blankly for a moment, then his eyes settled on Dean. "What happened?"

Dean stared at him for a moment. Did this make sense? Did any of this make any sense? "I'm not sure," Dean admitted. At least it was the truth.

Out of sheer habit, he popped the car door open and got out, and only after the fact did Dean realize his legs felt kind of numb. How long had they been out? The air smelled faintly of exhaust, and birds tweeted in the near distance, but otherwise, things were as they always were. The sun was out, it was lightly overcast, the clouds too flimsy and white to be any threat. Where was the Darkness?

He heard Sam follow him out, heard the slam of the car door and footsteps crunching on gravel. "Is there any chance this was a hallucination?"

"Man, that'd make my week." Dean realized he almost missed the gnawing, constant rage of the Mark. It had been comforting to think it was all the mark and none of it was him. Now he had no excuse.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. What greeted him was odd. "You gettin' a signal?"

Sam pulled out his phone and checked. "No. Huh. That's weird." Sam pointed off towards a slender wire pole in the distance. "That's a cell tower. We should have nothing but reception."

"Okay. My bad feeling about all of this just got worse." He shoved his useless phone back in his pocket and returned to the car, Sam following him. Sam's relative silence was notable. He probably didn't know how to talk about everything that had just happened, so he was doing the Winchester thing, which was setting it aside until later, if ever.

Dean still didn't feel right, but wasn't sure why. But he did the Winchester thing, and started the car. He'd figure it out later.

Once on the road, the first thing that struck him was how free of traffic it was. Really, there was nothing. This was a semi-rural location, so it didn't bother him initially, but after a couple of miles, the lack of other vehicles stuck out like a Satanist in a nunnery.

Sam did something odd. He turned on the radio, which was usually a Dean thing (driver picks the music), but nothing came through but static. He started turning the dials, doing front to back, AM to FM, and it was all the same. Even the type of static didn't waver. "Where is everybody?" Sam asked.

A knot formed in the pit of Dean's stomach. "Maybe if we're lucky, this is purgatory."

"Does it look like purgatory to you?"

"No. But maybe it's changed since I was last there."

It was then Dean saw the deer on the side of the road. A young buck, its antlers still stained with fuzz, and its head twisted around, so it was facing its own tail. It was wandering around, rear leg crooked and dragging, a large gash on its side that was bloody but leaking no blood. "Sam," Dean said, hoping against hope he was hallucinating. Maybe that's what happened when you killed death. The universe took revenge in a barrage of horrifying images, one after the other, until you couldn't take it anymore.

It took Sam a second to find what he was looking at, but when he did, his jaw dropped, and his eyes widened in shock. "What … Jesus, how is that deer alive?"

"Its's not alive," Dean said, suddenly sure of what had happened. Oh shit. "Its neck is broken, and it's not bleeding. It should be bleeding."

"T-that's not possible, Dean. It's badly hurt. It wouldn't be walking around if it was dead."

He stopped the car as the deer continued its drunken, stumbling way by the side of the road. It must have died at the exact same time, or just after. "Sammy, I killed Death."

For a second, Sam stared at him, and his complexion paled to the color of oatmeal. "No. That's not – How is that possible? Death is … you can't just get rid of it."

Dean rested his forehead on the steering wheel. Once again, he had acted without thinking, and once again, the world was suffering for it. "Except I did. Son of a bitch."

"No, we're jumping to conclusions. One deer doesn't mean death is gone. And what does it have to do with the lack of radio waves or reception? Let's just get back to Cas and Rowena, and see what's happening from there, okay?"

Dean knew, in his gut, he had fucked up everything. Some instinct in him had picked up the lack of death, and that's why everything felt so wrong. What was life without death? Was it a blessing or a curse now that the Darkness was loose?

He put the car in drive and kept going, even though the leaden feeling in his stomach had solidified, like all his internal organs had turned to metal. He could almost hear Bobby saying, _'You idjit. You goddamn idjit. Look what you've done.'_

The answer was less than a mile down the road. There was a smashed up blue Honda in the road, surrounded by a halo of broken glass, its front end so crumpled it was almost completely flat. It had collided with the deer, and neither had come out intact. There was a faint, dark trail of blood showing the deer's stumbling progress away from the car, and the blood trail stopped a few yards away, probably pinpointing its time of death.

The driver's side door had fallen off, and sitting beside it on the asphalt was a man. His legs had been obliterated by the accordioning of the front end, leaving them a mangled mess of blood and bone above the knees. (There was nothing below the knees but shreds of skin and cloth.) The car's steering wheel was imbedded in his torso like an askew breastplate, and it looked like some of his intestines were peeking out of the bottom. The remains of his shirt and pants looked dark red from blood, but he didn't appear to be bleeding anymore. He stared at them as they drove past, eyes huge in a pale face, probably still in shock. Also dead, and not dead. What must that feel like?

"Dean, stop the car," Sam said, his hand on the door handle.

Dean didn't. He gave it a little more gas. "We can't help him, Sam."

His head whipped around, and he glared at Dean. "Dean, stop the goddamn car."

He shook his head, gripping the steering wheel so tight his knuckles turned white. "He's dead."

"No he's not. He's badly hurt. We have to do something –"

Sam went on, but all Dean could hear right now was the thudding of his own heart in his ears. Tears prickled at the corners of his eyes, but he blinked them back. He didn't want to say it, but it came back to Dean as hard as any punch. Sam's cold, cold skin. "Do you have a pulse?"

Dean had asked it quietly, but Sam must have heard some of it, because he stopped ranting at him. "What?"

"Do you have a pulse?"

Sam scoffed and shook his head. "What the hell are you talking about, Dean? Of course I have a pulse. I'm talking, aren't I?" Perhaps to humor him, he grabbed his left wrist in his right hand. "Dean, look. I can understand why you have this theory, but …" Sam was suddenly distracted, and moved his thumb's placement on his wrist. He moved it again, and then gave up and put two fingers on the base of his throat. Even Dean knew if your heart was beating, you could feel it there.

"Tell me you found it." There was a long moment of silence, and Dean looked over at Sam, with his hand still at the base of his own throat. "Sam?"

His hand fell to his lap, and he stared out the windshield like there was something out there besides miles of bad and empty roads. "I can't find it. I don't think my heart is beating." Sam finally looked at him, with nothing but pleading in his eyes. He was terrified.

He'd killed Death to save Sam, but it hadn't mattered at all. Sam died anyway. Only, he wasn't quite dead. Nothing was exactly dead.

' _Idjit,'_ Bobby said again, in the depths of Dean's mind. ' _You goddamn idjit. Look what you've done.'_


	2. Game of Thorns

_**2 – Game of Thorns**_

Crowley could not recall a time when he was so furious. You'd think, in all his years, from mortal to King of Hell, he'd have gotten this enraged. But oh no. What a mother did to her children.

While that witch bitch somehow froze him, powerless, to the spot, he wasn't really as powerless as she thought. As Castiel was growling like a pit bull and bleeding from the eyes, bearing down on him with an angel blade, Crowley summoned minions to put space between him and the rabid angel.

A couple died, sure, but one of the smart ones brought some holy oil, and now they had Castiel confined to a circle, which he kept trying to get out of, as mindlessly as a rat in a cage. He was still snarling, still crying tears of blood, and still swinging that knife around like it could cut through the barrier. "For Hell's sake, man, angel up," Crowley spat. The time his minion's bought had allowed him to crack the binding spell his mother had thrown, but Castiel was still under her sorcery. Some angel. Crowley knew he'd just gotten his grace back, but he should have broken through it by now. They weren't humans, and this was penny ante bullshit. Maybe Crowley should appear before him as Dean; maybe the shock of seeing his boyfriend – or the human he was supposed to be the guardian of; in angel terms it was the same thing - would shake him up enough to bust through.

She talked a good game, and she had the benefit of surprise, but it was just a super-powered spell. It would overwhelm humans, probably kill and mesmerize them by the score, but Crowley couldn't remember the last time he was fully human. He was the King of Hell, goddamn it, and she was never getting one up on him again. "Track her down. I want her head on a plate before the night is over," he told one of his smarter minions, who went by the name Michelle. "The uglier the kill, the better." She nodded and left the run down church, headed out to alert the demons of Earth. There were so, so many. The Winchesters and the rest of the lame ass Hunters were fighting a war they could never win, but it was amusing to see them try.

One of the other minions, Alberto, currently inhabiting the body of six foot six linebacker with a neck as thick as a canned ham, looked at the snarling Castiel with disdain. "We have numbers here. Why don't we just off the winged freak?"

He eyed Alberto like a toenail he just found in his salad. His slight esteem for him went down several notches. "What a brilliant idea. Yes, let's kill the only angel who's on our side. That's bloody genius, Alberto."

Alberto at least had the good sense to look down and seem contrite, but before Crowley send him down to clean the fifth circle of Hell with a toothbrush, he felt …

He had no word for this feeling. It prickled along his scalp like a thousand angry centipedes, and sent a hot flush down his spine. And it wasn't only him who felt it. Castiel stopped mid-lunge at the exact same time, something like fear and coherence breaking through his bloody eyes. Crowley met his gaze, and in that moment, they had the clarity of shared awareness. They felt something _heave_ on the celestial scale, something mere mortals and even his minions couldn't feel.

Alberto was suddenly aware he was no longer the focus of Crowley's rage. He looked up, and at the other demons, who seemed puzzled as well. "Sir? Is something wrong?"

"Castiel, what was that?" Crowley asked. It was stirring something in his lizard brain, something … bad. Very bad. But he couldn't put a name to it. Castiel was technically an older being than he was, he hoped he had the word for it.

Castiel blinked rapidly, his arm falling to his side. His eyes were still bleeding, but he was no longer lost in mindless rage. It didn't suit him anyway. Castiel was better at being holier than thou than angrier than thou. "I –" his mouth opened and closed soundlessly for a moment, and then he looked down and saw the ring of holy fire around him, confining him to the spot. "What happened?"

"Never mind that now," Crowley snapped. "What was that thing? What fresh hell has happened now?" If his mother had somehow thrown open the gates of his Hell, he was going to crucify her, and then skin her alive. Maybe he'd take her hair as a wig.

The angel still seemed stunned, but he was finally rolling with it. You'd think, after all this time babysitting Dean, he'd be used to this whiplash of circumstances. "I think it was the Darkness. But … that's not possible. I was told it was banished …"

"The Darkness? I assume you don't mean the band." Castiel stared at him blankly. Still no sense of humor. "Are you talking about primordial darkness? The big bad stuff before your dad brought the hammer down?"

Castiel wiped the blood from his eyes with the back of his hand, and stared at the smeared crimson like he couldn't understand how it had come from him. That spell would have shriveled a human like a raisin. He could almost applaud his mother's cruelty, if she wasn't such a tremendously foul piece of shit. "Yes. I … Rowena couldn't have done that. No one's that powerful …"

Crowley could still feel the echoes of the power crawling over his skin, a million spiders with needle sharp legs. Normally he'd get a little erotic charge out of it, but now it was just annoying. "Who could've done that?"

"I don't know. I was told it was contained –"

"And this is the first time Heaven has lied to you?" Crowley snapped. He didn't have time for Castiel's wounded puppet act. He may have been his enemy under most circumstances, but he did genuinely feel sorry for Castiel. He so wanted to be good, and he was such a born victim, and he would always be. Part of it was his fault for being so naïve and so trusting, but ultimately he was made that way. His father was almost as cruel as Crowley's mother. They were both echoes of their parents, trapped forever in these confining little boxes.

Castiel gazed at him steadily, eyes blue as the sky and nearly as empty. "This is bad, Crowley. Let me out of the circle."

Alberto shifted nervously on his feet. "Sir? Maybe we shouldn't –"

"We can't fight this alone," Castiel demanded. "We may not even be able to fight it at all." There was a brittle edge to Castiel's voice. It was probably as close as any angel ever came to panic. It was not comforting to hear at the moment.

"Put it out," Crowley said, waving his hand towards the circle. His minions exchanged uncertain glances, and this displeased him immensely. "Did I stutter? Put. It. Out."

They just about fell over themselves dousing the flames, splashing water from flasks and glasses alike. As soon as the last flame was extinguished, Castiel teleported away, with the slightest sound of ruffled feathers.

Crowley glared at Alberto. "I'm your King. You think I don't see those thoughts rattling around your empty skull? If there's trouble I'd rather the angels deal with it. We have better things to do. Why the hell am I explaining myself to you?" He reached out with his mind and pulled, and the demon violently expelled itself out of the host body's mouth in a gush of spectral black smoke. It seemed to disappear through the floor as the host body fell like a hunk of dead meat.

To be honest, Crowley had never felt something like that, something that frayed nerves he didn't have and rattled bones that he no longer had. It was like something kicking the legs out from under the universe. This was something older than him, harder, uglier, and he wasn't sure that existed since Lucifer got caged.

Were they fucked? He got the impression that they were all very fucked right now. He didn't like the feeling.

The dead host body suddenly sat up, eyes as wide as saucers. "Wh-where am I?" the human asked.

The remaining five of his minions looked at it, confused, and then looked at Crowley, clearly figuring it was his doing. But Crowley hadn't done a thing. How was that meat bag still alive? Alberto had been wearing him for months.

Crowley snapped his fingers, switching off whatever life was left in that thing, and it collapsed back to the floor. He looked around at his demons, and said, "Well? Are you finding that witch or not?"

Once again, they just about fell all over themselves doing what he asked, his latest display of violence only spurring them on to more comical heights. There was almost a traffic jam getting out the door. If there was any justice in the world, Yakety Sax should have started playing.

The meat bag sat up again. "Where am I?"

Crowley stared at him, only now grasping what was going on. He got no sense of death.

Death was a universal constant, an immutable law of the universe, and he could often feel it, like a background thrum. He could no longer feel it. Which didn't make sense at all. "Oh, sleep, for fuck's safe," he said, giving the human a mental push. Finally he collapsed comatose to the floor.

Was it his mother, or the fucking Winchesters? Who was messing with the fabric of the universe?

Morons. This planet was full to bursting with morons.

* * *

Castiel wanted to be in several different places at once, but inevitably the screaming souls won.

All angels could see and feel souls. This was a difficult concept to explain to Humans, and in fact Cas didn't really bother to try. Demons who fed on souls could sniff them out like blood, while angels saw them much like a candle flame in the dark. They actually had a kind of sound, like a faint, ethereal hum. The closest he had ever heard to a soul sound was a singing bowl in a Buddhist temple, but even that had been too loud, and too deep. But for a time while he was mortal, he used to stop at a temple just to hear it, to be reminded of the comfort and beauty of that sound.

Now, they were screaming.

It started as a small shift and noise, and grew and grew, like a tidal wave gaining strength. It was the Darkness. It was rolling over the sea of humanity, killing some and infecting others. There was no rhyme or reason to who lived and who died. But not only could he hear them being snuffed out, he could feel it, a death by a thousand pinpricks.

It was horrible, a massacre, and he could do nothing but watch and feel as it spread out over the globe, decimating the entire planet in the blink of an eye. And yet, it wasn't exactly proper death.

Death was gone. He could sense that too, just like the souls. Life and death were a two faced coin, but now there was just the one. How had that happened? There was no way that should have happened. It shouldn't have been a remote possibility. So, on the one hand, the people the Darkness killed weren't dead. They were still here. The Earth remained intact.

But not for long. No death was a catastrophe, slightly worse than Death simply wiping everything out. Which was why such a state of affairs should have been completely impossible.

He had no time to contemplate what Rowena had done to him, even though no witch should have been powerful enough to afflict an angel. He had to find out what had happened to Death.

No, strike that. He had to find Sam and Dean.

He knew something was wrong with them. He could feel Dean's pain even from here. He willed himself to him, to where Dean was, and he was not surprised to find himself in the back seat of the Impala, Dean driving and Sam in the passenger seat. "What's happened?"

Both Dean and Sam jumped, as if they hadn't expected him, but they should have by now. Humans could be so silly at times.

"Today isn't the day to sneak up on us, Cas," Sam said.

"Bring him back," Dean snapped immediately, stepping on Sam's sentence. "Cas, fix him."

He almost asked who, but he didn't have to. He heard one soul in this car, one unstifled by the Darkness. He met Sam's eyes, and while he seemed shocked, Castiel also saw forgiveness there. He knew he couldn't do anything for him, and he was giving him absolution. "Dean –"

Dean heard it in the tone of his voice. He turned to look at him, anger making his features stark. "No! Don't you dare say there's nothing you can do!"

"The Darkness has him," Cas explained. With Dean there was a fine line between being gentle, which was kind, and too gentle, which made him bristle. "I can't do anything against the Darkness. I'm not sure anyone can."

Dean was shaking his head, increasing the speed of the car. The angrier he was, the more reckless he drove. "Don't give me that crap, Cas. There has to be somethin' we can do."

It was then Castiel noticed the Mark was gone from Dean's arm. So the spell had worked. Maybe that was the one good thing to happen today. "How did this happen? Do you know how the Darkness got loose? And where's death?"

He watched as Dean and Sam shared a troubled, knowing look, and Castiel wished, for a single moment, he could be Human again, just to feel the satisfying, hot rush of righteous rage. "What have you done?" How could Dean and Sam have banished death? That didn't even make sense.

Until, of course, it did. They told him what happened, and Castiel was of two minds, both disbelieving the story and believing it easily. The strength of the Winchesters was also their most devastating weakness: the bonds of brotherhood. Strong enough to destroy the universe.

Castiel sat back and let the information wash over him. Was he here to witness the destruction of Earth? It seemed likely, and it also seemed like that may have been why his father wanted Dean pulled out of Hell in the first place. He wanted to scream in his true angel voice, shatter the glass and the eardrums of the Winchesters and the tires on the car, but he didn't. Angels weren't supposed to have feelings such as that. But the Earth he loved was now irrevocably doomed. How could he not feel this way?

"How did you not know the Mark was the only thing holding the Darkness back?" Dean demanded. He was shifting rage around, trying to find something to blame. It was a Human comforting mechanism to have something to blame. Its help was purely emotional.

But it was a good question, and a very fair one. Crowley's words came back to him. _And this is the first time Heaven's lied to you?_ "I was never told. I don't know why."

"I bet Metatron knew, that asshat," Dean grumbled.

"What about death?" Sam asked. "How do we fix that?"

"There is no fix for that. There is one Angel of Death, and you've destroyed him."

"What about Reapers?" Dean asked. "They still gotta be around."

"They are. But the source of their power is gone."

"There's gotta be something, Cas," Dean insisted, as they finally drove into the city, and Dean had to immediately stomp on the brakes. Castiel felt the insistent pull of inertia, but managed to stay where he was.

The street was a parking lot. Cars had collided, while others had simply stopped. Some still had their engines running, pushing out plumes of exhaust that soared into the sky. People had abandoned their cars. Some were dead, but much like Sam, still walking around. There was a man on the corner waving a hastily drawn up sign, screaming, "Repent! The Rapture is here! Repent!"

There was a man on the sidewalk. Clearly he had jumped from one of the building, but he wasn't dead, just hideously mangled. Half his head was flat, and he was swimming in a pool of blood. But only his arms moved, as his legs were broken and useless.

There were fights occurring on the same sidewalk, so large you could almost call it a mosh pit. It was hard to say who was fighting who or why, or who if anyone was winning. They weren't paying any attention to the injured man, or the man screaming about the Rapture. (Which was a strangely judgmental piece of Human fiction, but if it made some people feel better, they could believe it.) There were two buildings at the head of the street on fire, and another shop being looted, and car and store alarms made an irritating background sound.

For a second, Castiel thought about stopping it, just wading into the crowd and rendering them all unconscious. But then he saw the battles on the other side of the street, and up the road, and inside buildings. People did think it was the end, or they were filled with Darkness, but either way he couldn't handle it all. It was all pain and fear and noise, and no one on Earth could do anything about it.

"What do we do?" Sam asked.

"Return to the Bunker," Castiel said. "There's no help we can offer. Not yet."

Dean's eyes met Castiel's in the rearview mirror. "So there is a play we can make?"

"Not to my knowledge. But we have to try something." And with that, he willed himself to the only place he could think might help in this time of crisis.

Castiel found himself facing the monkey bars at the hidden entrance of Heaven, but while it seemed empty, he knew he was not alone. He turned, and Hannah was right there, holding an archangel blade to his throat. Her face was a perfect mask of unholy anger. "Give me one reason not to kill you, Castiel."

Telling her that he still wouldn't go anywhere even if she did probably wouldn't go down well at the moment, so he kept that thought to himself. "You may need all the angels you have."

She scowled, but finally lowered the blade. "For what? You're not going to suggest fighting the Darkness, are you?"

"We don't have a choice."

"You know as well as I do the angels were almost wiped out in the first battle with the Darkness, and there were a million of us. We have a fourth that number now, and no back up. Heaven has barely recovered from the last shock. Besides which, dare I mention the lack of death?"

"That might work in our favor."

She gave him a glare that had a very Human portion of anger in it. "I know this is the Winchester's doing."

"It wasn't on purpose."

"I don't care. They've destroyed the universe, Castiel! I think you're absolved of protecting them anymore."

Angels were quite literal, unlike Humans, who liked to obfuscate with the smallest, most inconsequential things. Still, angels could be very surgical with their language, and say things without actually saying them. Such as now. Hannah was telling him, without using the exact words, that he was free to execute them for the greater good. The problem was, they wouldn't die, and it wouldn't solve anything. (And Sam was already dead anyway.) "There has to be a way to restore Death to the universe. I can't believe there isn't a failsafe for this. It's an intrinsic law."

"And it should be indestructible. Who would even think of killing Death?"

Castiel almost said _'Dean'_ , but swallowed it. It was a rhetorical question. "There has to be something in the archives. What about Ascension?"

Hannah's eyes were a clear, cold blue that reminded him of a mountain lake he once saw in the Alps. The Earth was so beautiful. The Humans had no idea how good they had it. "A true Ascension hasn't been done in a millennium. I'm not sure there's an angel alive from when it was done. And who's going to volunteer for such a horrible thing?"

Castiel couldn't help it. He held up his hands, a Human gesture, one that he hadn't quite shaken from his repertoire. Her brow wrinkled in confusion, so clearly she'd been back in heaven long enough to forget the Human gestures. Perhaps she was lucky. "Me, Hannah. Make me the new Angel of Death."


	3. Witching Hour

_**3 – Witching Hour**_

Metatron couldn't believe those shaved apes did it.

He knew it was within the realm of possibility that they would destroy the world, and in fact it was a guarantee they would at some point – most evolved races ran into that problem at a certain point. But the thought that the Winchesters would? Crazy. They were so stupid! Did they not think that maybe the Mark of Cain existed for a reason beyond the obvious? He knew Castiel was out of the loop, because obvs, but it was hilarious to think those buffoons could accomplish anything. They weren't good more than they were lucky, and they had a habit of picking good allies. While Cas was pathetic, he did have his moments, and Crowley was quite possibly the cleverest demon he had ever come across. He was slick enough to talk Pestilence into a health insurance plan.

But Metatron had prepared for the worst, in case the idiots managed to do it. He found a genuine nuclear survival bunker, a quarter of a mile underground. It was made of metal and concrete slabs, and could, in theory, survive a direct strike with a bunker buster missile. Metatron didn't actually care about any of that. He cared about the air filtering system, which was state of the art.

If the Darkness got loose, there was still a chance it could get him down here, but he figured it would take a while. It would give him enough time to figure out how to take over Hell.

If he couldn't take over Heaven – which seemed to be out now, especially since he was mortal – he was pretty sure he could find something on the demon tablet that would allow it. Okay, yeah, he had to get over the whole mortal thing first, and Crowley was going to be a bitch, but he had a good feeling about this. He could work it. And since this shitball little planet was doomed, it was time to try another dimension.

Metatron knew it had happened when the special little emergency radio he had down here fuzzed out. There were no radio signals at all, which was impossible … unless a big ass EMP had gone off, or the Darkness was out. For the first few minutes, Metatron just couldn't stop laughing. Those morons went and did it. They removed the Mark. Son of a bitch.

The Winchesters were very nearsighted. They thought the demon tablets were only for closing the gates of Hell. But there was so much else you could do with it. For instance, there was a recipe for expelling all the demons from Hell. Now why would someone do such a thing, unleash true Hell on Earth? Because it was easier to take over Hell that way. Once the Demons were banished, you could just waltz in, put up a few fortification spells, and run the joint. Crowley was going to be a pain in the ass, he knew it, but he was sure he could best him. Once you were on Hell's throne, it was easy to call the shots. Him not being a demon was something he was going to have to work out sooner rather than later, but he had some time. Get in Hell, fortify first. The rest he could figure out. And who was going to notice all the demons on Earth anyway? If the Darkness was loose, the demons would be quaint in comparison.

He had everything he needed for the spell. He was just going to figure out where to make his entrance, and brave the Darkness. Unlike Heaven, Hell had many entrances, as it was generally accepted that no one was actually going to look for a way in. Entering was super easy, but leaving was the hard part.

"Well, this is a drab place." The sound of a woman's accented voice made him jump up from the table where he had been plotting.

Standing in the main room of his concrete bunker was a woman with long, curly red hair, wearing a dark blue velvet dress. He'd never seen her before, and hadn't a clue how she got in here. He didn't think she was an angel, mainly because she was smiling at him, and angels usually didn't do that. "Who the hell are you?" He had taken to wearing an angel blade under his shirt, just in case Cas got a drop on him.

"The name's Rowena. I don't think we've been properly introduced," she said, holding out her hand. Did she actually expect him to kiss it? Her accent was Scottish. Or maybe Irish – he habitually got those two mixed up.

"Demon?"

She actually tittered. "Dear me no. And I'm not a feathered freak either, in case that was your next question. You were Metatron, weren't you?"

"I still am Metatron. My grace is gone, but I'm still me. Now tell me who the hell you are before I fill your ass full of lead."

She gave him a pained smile. She was wearing an awful lot of lipstick. It made her mouth look bloody. "We have some common enemies, you and I. Crowley, Castiel, the Winchesters. Ring any bells?"

Metatron folded up his papers where he'd been sketching out his siege of Hell. She was smiling and cheerful, and making his skin crawl. "How did you teleport into my bunker? How did you find me?" He had Enochian wards up, demon wards as well. He wasn't stupid. But no Human could have teleported in, so exactly what had he forgotten?

She beamed at him. "I didn't mean to find you at all. I put out a location spell on the demon tablet. Finding you here is just a happy accident." She looked around at the cement walls with the Enochian sigils daubed on them in blood. "Is it against your religion to hire a decorator? Hell's basement looks better than this."

The mention of Hell threw him off, but the spell could only mean one thing. "You're a witch." Did he have time to get his gun? He'd forgotten all about the possibilities of witches.

"Correction. I'm the best damn witch this planet has ever seen." She raised her hand, and suddenly Metatron was frozen to the spot. He couldn't even blink. "And I'm going to rip Hell right out from under that snot nosed brat of mine." She held out her other hand, and the demon tablet flew right to her. Metatron kept trying to move, but it felt like she had turned his body to stone.

She gave the tablet a once over, still smiling like this was a jolly lark. "With this and The Book of the Damned, it should be no problem at all throwing my traitorous son out on his boney arse. Maybe I'll turn him mortal again. He wouldn't last five minutes."

"The Book of the Damned?" Metatron repeated. Of all the things she said, that was the most alarming. "Did you unleash the Darkness?"

She shrugged with a rather surprising amount of nonchalance. "Only in a technical sense." The tablet disappeared into thin air, and she smiled, impressed with her own parlor trick. "Tell me, dearie, are there more tablets like this? I've heard tell of an angel one."

"It was destroyed."

"Was it now?" She came close to him, and if he could have moved, he'd have had a great opportunity to pop her head off her smug neck. As it was, she looked at him, and Metatron could've sworn he felt her in his head for a split second, rooting around like a dog looking for a lost bone. "That's a shame. I guess I'll have to make do without it." She reached under his shirt, and pulled out his angel blade. "Oh goody, I've always wanted one of these."

She was close enough to kiss him, but that wasn't what Rowena had in mind. Instead, she gazed longingly at the knife, and said, "Let's see if it works, shall we?"

Metatron was so paralyzed by her spell, he didn't even feel it as she sliced his head off.

* * *

Sam was well aware of the irony, and really didn't appreciate it, for all the good that did.

A little over an hour ago, he was pleading with Dean not to kill him. Now he was dead, but so was Death, and the Darkness had taken over the planet. And he was still walking and talking. He was also still doing research, which could either be his Heaven or his Hell, depending on what he was looking up. Right now, it was Hell.

Dean was a mess. He was pacing, fidgeting, a ball of anger with no outlet. Dean knew he had fucked up, and while he was mentally beating himself up, outwardly he didn't know how to cope. So he was already drinking beer, and Sam knew better than to point out how early it was. Besides, if the world was ending, who cared? Get drunk. Hell, he should be on his fifth whiskey by now.

But no, rather than drinking, Sam was pursuing what appeared to be a hopeless cause. He wasn't hungry, he wasn't thirsty, and he belatedly realized he hadn't even tried to breathe. This was death, huh? It wasn't too bad, at least for the moment. He could take some comfort in that.

Sam slammed closed the old book he'd been searching, and shoved it over to the pile of ones that he'd already searched. "Anything?" Dean asked.

"No. Darkness, if it is ever mentioned, it's only in a euphemistic way. I haven't found anything about the death of Death, either."

Dean sighed and collapsed into a chair at the end of the table. He put his half empty beer bottle down with a heavy clunk. "So we're back to screwed?"

"I don't think we ever left screwed."

Dean pulled out his phone by force of habit, but since it was a brick, he tossed it down the table, where it came to rest with the books. "There's gotta be something we can do besides sitting here with our thumbs up our asses."

Sam grabbed one of the books from his unsearched stack and slid it across to him. "Get reading."

Dean sighed heavily and gave him number three of his fifteen assorted irritated looks (number twelve was his personal favorite), but he picked up the book and cracked it open. Sam opened his book, and searched the index.

Dean kept shooting him looks out of the corner of his eye, and Sam knew he was working up to something. Sam knew what too. Finally, Dean said, "Sam, I'm sorry."

"It's fine." Weirdly enough, it was. Maybe this was another side effect of death, but Sam felt strangely … relieved? Yeah, that was the only word for it. It felt like he could finally rest, and he hated himself for that cowardice. But it was true. Maybe he could get off the merry-go-round, leave the world saving to someone else. Except there might be no way to save the world, and whose fault was that?

"No, it's not. I'm –"

"Dean," he interrupted, wishing he could sigh. Well, maybe he could, but he was kind of afraid to try. "Really. It's okay. No one knows shit happens more than us, and if you have a pity party about this I'm going to bludgeon you to death with this book. So shut up and read."

Dean looked mildly surprised, but Sam went back to skimming the index. A few seconds went by before Dean muttered, "Someone's bitchy today."

Sam didn't respond, but he did smirk a little.

After a minute, Cas suddenly appeared in the center of the room, as he was wont to do. Sam had never said it, but sometimes he wished he could put a bell on his neck so they always knew the second he showed up.

"Tell me you got something for us," Dean said.

Castiel approached the table, and while his expressions were often hard to read – no one had a poker face like an angel – he looked as concerned as he ever did. "Not really. Hannah is researching a ritual for me."

Hannah was the angel now in charge of Heaven. Sam wasn't surprised that's where he went, but after they broke Metatron out of prison, he was a little shocked Cas would risk it. "What ritual?" Sam wondered. "Computers are down, but I have all the books you could want."

Cas shook his head. "They wouldn't have anything on this ritual. It's Ascension."

Dean looked at Sam, hoping he knew what he was talking about. Sam could only shrug. "Gonna hafta unpack that for us, Cas."

"It's a ritual to turn me into the new Angel of Death."

Cas wasn't completely angel anymore. He'd been around them too long, been briefly mortal, been briefly insane. He was at least familiar with the concept of humor, even if it was still unusual at best. Sam knew it was possible he was joking. But he didn't think so.

Dean clearly thought not as well. He was already standing. "What the hell did you just say?"

"The Horsemen were all angels before they became the Horsemen. If I become Death, it will restore balance to the universe."

"Are you frigging insane?" Dean yelled. At least now he had a target for his rage. "You wanna become a goddamn Horseman? How does that help expel the Darkness?"

"It doesn't. But it's a starting point."

Dean shook his head. "I can't believe I'm hearing this."

Cas turned his focus on Dean, determined to convince him of something. "If I am Death, I will have the power to return many of the Darkness claimed to life."

Now they were both staring at him. "What?"

"Death has resurrection powers?" Sam asked. He imagined, if his heart was still beating, it would have sped up.

"In a manner of speaking, yes. There is a certain amount of time in which Death can reject souls. Death's rejection brings them back."

Dean looked at Sam, and he saw something really troubling in Dean's expression: hope. It was amazing how often hope had turned into a gut punch for the Winchesters. It was like a family curse. After a long moment, Dean looked back at Cas. "How long will this Ascension take?"

"Wait a minute," Sam said. "If you're Death, can you expel the Darkness? I mean, you can rob them of souls."

Cas gave him a hangdog look that was actually kind of a constant for him. He suspected Cas spent a lot of time feeling bad for Humans, even though he didn't say it. "I don't think so. It could hurt it, but we'd need more power to truly expel the Darkness."

"You're not gonna say all the Horsemen, are you?" Dean asked. "'Cause I'm thinkin' they're holding a grudge."

"It wouldn't be wise to summon them," Cas agreed.

"What happens to you?" Sam wondered.

That made Dean realize he'd forgotten all about the finer details of the plan. "Yeah. What if you do become a Horseman? We gonna have a repeat of you being an overpowered dickhead?"

Cas shrugged, which was always a troubling gesture from him. "I don't know. I hope not."

"Don't you think we should find out first?" Dean replied.

"I'm not sure there's any way to do that."

Sam rubbed his eyes as Dean told Cas that this was crazy. Sometimes Sam felt like he could leave the room, and it would be a long time before either of them noticed he was missing. Sam figured it was because Cas was sent to pull Dean out of Hell, and it created a bond between them closer than Sam and Cas had ever had. But he found it kind of comforting because – except for the time Cas lost his mind – he knew he would always look out for Dean, so maybe Sam didn't have to. The funniest thing was, Dean had a genuine guardian angel here on Earth, and never seemed to realize it. How he missed Cas's devotion was just a puzzling example of one of Dean's blind spots. Cas never calling him on it just proved how much of an angel he was.

"We need a plan," Sam finally interrupted. "Becoming Death is part of one, but there's nothing if we can't find a way to beat back the Darkness." He focused on Cas, who was back to paying attention to him. "You've dealt with it before, yes?"

"Not personally. But angels have. The Darkness had to be beaten and contained before the Earth was habitable."

Sam closed his book, because he knew it had no helpful information. He suspected no Earthly library could be of assistance right now. "How did they do it?"

"All the angels fought. So did God. But he's …"

"Fucked off to another universe?" Dean suggested.

Cas shot him a remarkably evil look. "Missing. And there aren't as many angels as there used to be. We don't have the manpower."

"Could we make it up somehow?" Sam asked. "Spells, rituals, something?"

"We gotta assload of weapons," Dean said. "Any of those help?"

Cas shook his head. "I don't see how. No weapon is …" Cas suddenly trailed off, looking of towards a nowhere point in the middle distance. "Oh. Why didn't I think of that before?"

"Think of what?" Sam asked, but somewhere between blinks, Cas had disappeared again.

"Thanks for the head's up," Dean shouted to the ceiling. Sarcasm didn't work when the person you were talking to was nowhere near you.

But Dean's previous comment had made Sam think. The Men of Letters had so many artifacts, so many dangerous tomes. Was there really nothing that could help? He stood up from the table, done with these books. "Maybe we oughta check out the vault."

"Think demon branded chains and shotguns full of rock salt are gonna make any difference?"

"Not the main vault. The forbidden vault."

Dean raised an eyebrow. "I like the way you're thinkin'. Let's go."

What they discovered when they went through the plans for this place was there was a secret room underneath the main weapons vault. It was absurdly hard to access and open – you had to pass various tests, like an adventurer in a fairy tale – but hidden within were items the Men of Letters considered nuclear. Weapons and artifacts too dangerous to keep with the rest, and yet too difficult to destroy. They'd never used them, because each object extracted a horrible price for its use, either from the person wielding it, or the people around them. In fact, over the main door, which was five feet of iron and salt infused concrete, was a very famous motto written in Latin. The English translation was _Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here_.

They'd already abandoned hope. Now it was time to go nuclear.


	4. Diamond Dogs

_**4 – Diamond Dogs**_

There was little doubt that things were as bad as they had ever been. But Crowley wasn't sure what to do about any of it.

Hell was a little chaotic, because panic was slowly but surely leaking out into the demon population. It was hard to say if the lack of death or the reemergence of the Darkness was the more bothersome thing, because they both had some solid negatives. None of this was a win for demon kind. It wasn't a win for anyone, except maybe some Humans who really wanted to live forever, no matter how shitty the world was.

He was pouring himself a drink in his throne room when he sensed the angelic incursion, and he turned to find Castiel standing there. Somehow he was not surprised.

Two of his largest demon guards barged into the room, and Castiel held up his hands. "I'm just here to talk."

Crowley made a point of studying him, even though he knew the angel was telling the truth. He just liked to make him wait. "It's okay," he told his guards. They exchanged troubled looks, but retreated, closing the doors behind them. Everyone knew better than to piss him off today.

Crowley finished pouring his drink, and then asked, "Want anything?"

"No, thank you."

"I didn't mean a drink."

It took Castiel a second, but he finally understood. "In that case, yes. I'm here to ask your help."

Crowley sat on his throne, cradling his crystal glass. "An angel asking a demon for help? Interesting."

"Heaven is planning to fight off the Darkness, but we don't have enough people. If you joined us, we would,"

Crowley knew he shouldn't laugh, but he did anyway. "Pull the other one."

"I'm serious."

"I'm sure you are, but why would demons fight beside angels? I don't know if you've noticed, but we're enemies in the wild." He took a sip of his scotch, and wondered why Castiel loved such doomed projects. He was such a glutton for punishment, he should just come out and admit his sadomasochism. It was 2015, people were much more open minded now.

Castiel frowned, wrinkling his brow like a Shar-Pei. "Having the Darkness gone will benefit you as much as us. When Death returns, we need the Darkness removed, or so many Humans will die your population will be untenable. You'll fight for the last remaining Humans, and then what? Does Hell have a back up plan?"

Crowley scowled at him, disliking his tone. He also really disliked the fact that he was one hundred percent correct. "What's the guarantee Death is coming back?"

"We're working on that now."

Crowley assumed he meant Heaven. At least they were trying to fix things. "Give me a ring when it's on the way."

Castiel took a step towards the throne, but stopped. He was here by Crowley's indulgence alone, and his patience was wearing thin. "I can guarantee you a temporary détente, in writing. If you don't attack us, we won't attack you, not until the Darkness is contained once more."

"And Heaven's on board with this, are they?"

"They will be."

Ooh. Now Crowley was really interested. Was Castiel rebelling once again? Angels with genuine free will were so rare, and risking expulsion every step of the way. It was fascinating to watch, like a squirrel running across a busy highway. They were going to get run over at some point, but you couldn't help but root for them, if only to show the bastards it could be done. He slugged down his drink, and sat forward. "What do I get out of it?"

"An inhabitable Earth."

"I need more."

Castiel actually rolled his eyes, like a bratty teenager. He'd been around the Winchesters too long. "What do you want?"

"To rule it."

Castiel frowned. "No."

"Then I guess we're done here."

To his surprise, Castiel nodded. "You were only plan A."

Was he actually leaving? He turned away, and Crowley could feel the energy build up of an angel about to teleport. "Wait a second. Haven't you ever heard of the fine art of negotiating?"

Castiel paused, and turned back towards him. "I have. But there's nothing to negotiate."

"Of course there is! I highball, you lowball, and eventually we'll come to an agreement that is satisfying to neither of us, but will allow us to save face amongst our people."

"There's nothing I can give you. I can convince Heaven of the benefit of a détente, but that's it. Anything more would be too far."

That was a pity, but he could totally see that. Heaven wasn't known for its generosity. "What about a personal favor?"

"It depends on the favor."

"I want my mother dead. I mean real dead, not corpse walking around dead. I'm sure Heaven could make that happen."

Castiel's lips thinned, as if put off by the idea of assassination. But who he was kidding? Castiel had killed for Heaven, killed for the Winchesters, and would undoubtedly kill again. Angels were soldiers, weapons of the empire. Humans wanted to believe they were harp playing fairies with nothing but good intentions, but that was all PR. They were demons with more inhibitions, bent towards obedience.

Crowley waited, and was willing to wait for a full day, but it didn't take that long. "Rowena really is your mother?"

"You couldn't tell?"

"No, I think I could." A muscle jumped in Castiel's jaw, and he finally met his eyes. "Fine. If we take out Rowena, you'll agree to the détente with Heaven?"

"Of course."

Castiel nodded. "I agree to your terms. But we keep it off the paperwork."

He grinned, still getting a thrill out of an illicit deal. Castiel was going to do it himself, off the books, maybe with the Winchesters help. "Absolutely."

And if it all blew up in their faces? Well, there were a couple of problems he'd no longer need to deal with. As far as Crowley could tell, it was a win-win.

He was aware of the power building as the angel prepared to go, but Castiel suddenly smiled at him, which was weird. He'd never seen him do it before. "There was no plan B." He then disappeared.

That little minx. Crowley knew he liked him for a reason, despite him being a featherhead.

* * *

Castiel knew what he was in for. As soon as he told Hannah of his plan, she looked at him like he was the craziest thing she'd ever seen. And that was a fair response. "Castiel," she finally said. She seemed to be struggling for words. "Team up with demons?"

"Our combined powers should defeat the Darkness." Castiel was in Hannah's office, for lack of a better term. It appeared to be made of a blue semi-translucent crystal, everything from the walls to the floor to the furniture, but it wasn't precisely real. In Heaven, the line between reality and desire was very thin. The landscape of Heaven seemed to change every twenty meters. You could be walking through a field of wildflowers on a sunny day, and then suddenly find yourself inside a cavernous cave where the rocks sparkled like diamonds, and then, in another few moments, you were in an arctic wasteland with snow up to your knees, and the Northern Lights glowing in the sky. It was beautiful, and hadn't quite prepared him for life on Earth, where landscapes changed over much greater distances. Also, the buildings were built, and didn't just spring up on an impulse. "Once I'm Death, it should be enough to turn the tide."

She sighed and looked down at the glossy blue surface of her desk. It appeared to be ice. "This is crazy, Castiel. How can we even trust Crowley?"

"Because the demons lose if the Earth falls to the Darkness. The Darkness isn't known to share." He did not tell her about the Rowena side of the deal, because she'd rightfully object. Unless he told her that she'd somehow cast a spell on him, and then she'd probably be all for it. No witch should have power over an angel. No one, no matter how pious, would stand for that. "Crowley isn't stupid. A week without enough Humans, and the demons would tear each other apart."

"Which could cause a revolution in Hell. Okay, I can see how that might convince him." She traced her fingers unconsciously over the top of her desk, leaving trails that existed for a moment before disappearing. "They'll probably think I'm demented"

"Great leaders don't worry about such things."

She gave him the faintest hint of a smile. "Is that flattery, Castiel?"

"No, only truth." She was a much better leader than he ever was. He was distorted and led astray by so many different emotions, Castiel knew he should have been exiled permanently from Heaven for all he had done. He should have been executed. The fact that he wasn't was either Heaven's strength or its weakness. He could see it either way. But sometimes, looking around Heaven, all he could see were his own sins.

"Do you honestly think this will be enough to work?"

"I'm betting all our lives on it. Well, if I'm Death I won't have one to wager. But you know what I mean."

She leaned back in her chair, lines of tension gathering at the corners of her eyes. "About that. There's a problem with the Ascendancy."

Castiel felt his stomach knot, even though he knew there was no way it could. So much of his plan to right this wrong depended on the return of Death. What would they do if they couldn't restore balance to the universe?

* * *

It actually took them twenty minutes to access the forbidden vault.

Dean honestly wanted to grab a sledgehammer and just go to town on the walls until they found the damn thing, but Sam insisted on doing it the "proper" way, answers the logic puzzles and avoiding the traps that kept the vault so well hidden. It was ridiculous and they didn't have time for it, but Sam loved this kind of shit, so Dean sucked it up and went along with it. Seeing Sam happy let him forget, for a couple of minutes anyway, that he was dead.

He was achingly aware of his failure. He destroyed Death to save Sam, and he didn't even do that right. And he didn't know how to fix any of it. He just hoped Cas's plan worked, because he didn't have a better one. Although every time he tried to imagine Cas as Death, he failed miserably. To be brutally honest, he wasn't sure Cas had the right temperament for it. Death was kind of a dick, but he radiated a sort of contemptuous menace that Cas just wasn't capable of. Even when he was crazy, he was menacing, but he didn't have that true disdain for life. And if Cas didn't have it after all this time, he was never going to. He'd be the universe's first Death filled with marshmallow fluff.

Finally the main door to the vault was revealed, and he and Sam had to put all their muscles opening the damn thing, because the door was impossibly heavy, and the Men of Letters wanted to make it as hard to open as they could.

The room smelled old. All the rooms smelled old when they first found this place, but not like this. This was a smell of time and age and bad intentions. There was an all pervasive scent of decay, even though nothing in here was actually decomposing. Dark magic had sunk into the walls, and it reeked of corruption you could never quite shake.

There were lights built into the walls, but they were almost completely swallowed by shadows that shouldn't have existed. The air was always thick and warm, almost humid, like they were over Hell's boiler room. Dean could stand about twenty minutes in here before it felt like he had a million bugs crawling on and under his skin, and he couldn't take it anymore. Of course, there were no real bugs, as even they couldn't live in here.

There was a file by the door, laminated and typed up as neat as a menu, marking names and locations of all the dangerous artifacts in here, cataloged to within an inch of their lives. Sam appreciated this, and had researched every single one of these things. Dean couldn't name one; Sam could give you the entire history of the thing. But, if anyone ever asked, Dean liked to describe himself as the muscle of this arrangement, as he wasn't the brightest guy in the world, but holy crap, could he beat the shit out of things. Sam was the brains. Although, if pressed, Dean would admit he had a pretty mean left hook too.

"What should we get?" Dean asked, snapping on his pocket flashlight. The weird shadows seemed to swallow the light; the beam barely made it six inches in front of them. Sometimes he'd swear he could push the shadows, and they could push back. Sam claimed that wasn't true, but couldn't explain any of this.

Sam studied the list, holding up his own flashlight to see. After a moment, he said, "Row three, shelf five, artifact number four. I'm going to grab the one on row five."

The artifacts were kept on meticulously numbered shelves that looked like repurposed bookshelves, with little white pinlights above the displays. It would have been hilariously chintzy and cheap if you didn't notice the abundance of hex bags, the bone and feather fetishes tucked into corners, the lines of salt glued at the edges of shelves, the pervasive smell of rosemary and sage mixed in with all the rot. This was a haunted place, full of haunted things. A library of the damned. Occasionally you could hear whispers in dead languages, but once Dean swore he heard a single word in Russian that he actually understood for some reason: _help_. He couldn't help but shudder, and was glad Sam couldn't see him do it.

Dean went down the rows, trying to ignore how the shadows flickered in his vision like firelight, and finally came to the artifact Sam wanted. It looked like a fragment of an archeological find, a shard of a shattered statue or pot. He couldn't even imagine what it had once been. "Sam, did you send me after a shard of pottery?"

"Yep."

Before they went in, both Dean and Sam had donned special gloves, which were leather with a silver mesh on the outside. It made them heavy and hot, and Dean's hands were already marinating in sweat. He picked up the shard carefully, ignoring the feeling of something crawling down his neck. He always felt that in this room, yet there never was anything. He figured it was the ghostly equivalent of tapping you on the opposite shoulder and quickly stepping away. "How the hell does this help us? You hoping the Darkness steps on this and cuts their foot?"

Sam appeared at the end of the aisle, as if pulling free of the sludgy dark. He was carrying what looked like a rusty old lantern. "Cute. It's imbued with the toxic blood of the demon lord Belial. Shatter it, and it kills everything within a one mile radius. And I mean everything. Insects, plants, soil bacteria, the person who breaks it."

Dean looked down at thing in his hand. This was a supernatural tactical nuke? You really could have fooled him. Good thing he didn't drop it. "How the hell are we gonna use it?"

"We aren't. I am." At Dean's look, Sam shrugged. "I can't be any more dead than I am now."

Dean followed Sam out, and then began the laborious process of closing the damn door. It was much easier than opening it, but it still seemed like the Men of Letters went out of their way to make things difficult. At least you didn't have to solve any puzzles to get the hell out of here. Maybe they figured no one would be inclined to stay. "So is the lantern for me?"

"No. It's called Diogenes' Lamp, although that's an in joke. Once activated, the light is so intense, it vaporizes everything that ever had a bad intention within the range of its light."

Dean had never heard of such a thing before. "You're kidding."

"Nope. They're not sure who created it, but they think it might have been a sorcerer with a grudge. Anyway, I'm giving it to Cas when he returns. Only angels can use this thing, as I'm pretty sure it'd kill every human who ever lived."

"No shit." Bad intentions was a super wide net. Even a toddler could get hit with that one. "So what's my weapon?"

"A spell. The problem is it's pretty intense."

"How much blood I gotta lose?" Blood magic was the most powerful, so that was an easy guess.

"About a half pint, but that's not the hard part." Sam paused in the hallway, and looked back at him nervously. "It drains life force from the spellcaster. If you're not careful and precise, it can drain you entirely."

It was Dean's turn to shrug. "It doesn't matter. It's all or nothing. If we don't win this one, we're all dead one way or another."

Sam briefly looked like he was going to object, but then decided against it. They'd lived through so many apocalypses now it seemed redundant even to worry about them.

Once they returned to the main room, they found Cas had returned, and was sitting at the table like a guy sweating a job interview. "Thanks for not startling us in the spooky room," Dean said, putting the shard down on the table. He couldn't wait to take the gloves off.

Cas was about to respond, but then he turned his gaze sharply on the pottery fragment. "Is that Belial's blood?"

Sam nodded. "We're breaking out the big weapons."

"I had no idea any of it still existed."

Sam put the lantern on the table in front of him. "And this is for the angels. I thought maybe you could use this in battle."

"Diogenes' Lamp," Cas said, surprised. Okay, so everybody knew about these things but him. Fine. Although he wasn't wearing heavy gloves, Cas touched the artifacts with no apparent harm. The rules didn't apply to angels. "I assumed this was destroyed."

"The Men of Letters tried, on multiple occasions," Sam replied, taking off his own gloves. "It always put itself back together by the next day."

"Fascinating." And that wasn't sarcastic. Cas was staring in the rusted old thing like maybe he could figure it out.

"After the battle – if there's an after – I want it back," Sam said.

Cas pondered that a second, then nodded. "I'll see to it it's returned." If an angel went nutty again, and wanted to wipe Humans off the planet, the lamp would be perfect for the job. It was best not to let them keep it, especially with their track record.

Dean sat down, and took a swig from his warm beer. Today he didn't care if it was warm or cold. "You ran out on us before you could tell us what the big plan was."

"Sorry," Cas said, pushing the lantern aside. "Hannah and Crowley have reached an agreement. The angels and the demons are going to fight the Darkness together."

"What?" Dean asked. Since when did angels and demons agree on anything?

"Cas, that's brilliant," Sam said, and his expression seemed to light up. He was genuinely enthused at the prospect. "Do you think it'll be enough?"

"It'll have to be." He paused briefly. "I also promised Crowley I'd kill Rowena."

"I'll help," Dean said. "She's on my to do list anyway."

Cas then sat forward, frowning, and turned puppy dog eyes on Dean. Dean knew from experience that Cas was tacitly apologizing to him before doing or saying something really terrible. He braced for impact. "There is a problem with Ascension."

Dean groaned inwardly. Son of a bitch. Two steps forward, two steps back. "What kinda problem?"

"There is, in our lore, a contingency plan for the replacement of Death. The English translation of it is _'whoever shall dethrone Death wears the mantel'_."

Dean puzzled over that for a second, while Sam said, with a lot of anger, "No! That is not happening."

Dean finally got it. "Oh. Holy shit." He killed Death. The mantel was his now.

"Go back to Hannah and tell her that's not happening," Sam insisted.

"It's even more complicated than that," Cas said. "A Human would never survive Ascension. They'd be torn to pieces."

"It's not happening, Cas," Sam said once more.

But Cas was ignoring him, because this was a conversation between the two of them. He'd probably guessed Sam's response long before it occurred. Cas kept giving Dean that look. It had never wavered. "There's another way."

"What?" Sam asked, still angry.

But somehow, Dean knew, even before Cas said it. "Allow me to take you as a host. I'll help you survive Ascension."


	5. This Corrosion

_**5 – This Corrosion**_

"Find another way," Sam said, still steaming mad at Cas. But why? Dean knew that getting Death involved in any of this was all his fault. "That isn't happening."

But Dean, after his initial shock, realized that it didn't scare him as much as it should have. In a way, this reeked of inevitability. He was always very good at killing. Seemed he was born to it. "What if you killed me, taking the mantle back?" Dean asked. He could see Sam's reaction out of the corner of his eye, and it was exactly what he expected.

Cas shook his head. "You'd have to fully take the mantle first. Believe me, I looked for a loophole."

"This is crazy," Sam said.

"If I'm Death, I can bring everyone back to life, right?"

"No," Sam insisted. "Dean, let me go."

Dean ignored him, and kept his focus on Cas. He knew how Sam would react to this, but he still didn't understand Dean was his big brother and he was gonna be goddamned if he was just going to let him – or the Earth - die without a fight.

"Those taken by the Darkness? Yes. Depending on when it's done, maybe more."

"Even if they don't have a body?" Dean only realized this second he had a list of people he wanted to resurrect. Some were far fetched, and he had a feeling Bobby would kill him if it was even remotely possible to do, but their lives had been so full of death, the list could never be small.

"Angels are very good at physical resurrections."

Sam grabbed Dean by the arm, and hauled him up out of his chair. "Cas, give us a minute."

Cas didn't even have time to consent. By the time Dean found his feet and yanked his arm free, Sam had dragged him half way across the room. "You are not even thinking about doing this," Sam said, like it was an order.

"I am. It's not nearly as crazy as it sounds."

He scoffed. "A Horseman, Dean? You wouldn't even be Human anymore."

"Some people might argue I haven't been Human for a while now."

Sam's eyes narrowed, and he sneered ever so slightly. "Don't even start that shit. You can't do this."

"He won't be harmed," Cas said. He was still at the table, but standing now. He was encompassing Sam in his pity gaze too. "I promise you, Sam."

Sam shot him a deathly glare. "Angels promise a lot of things. They don't always deliver."

"Hey, I appreciate this. But I'm not doing anything right now, okay? I'm just thinkin' about it." God, he hated lying to him. Okay, that wasn't always true, sometimes he made up shit when he was really little just to scare him for no reason, but what brother didn't do that? And right now, he had to look out for him, as much as Sam didn't want to hear it.

Dean walked back to the table, and grabbed his beer. Meeting Cas's eyes, he said, "I need time to think about this." While saying this, Dean was thinking furiously _'If you can hear me come to my room in ten minutes. Do not tip off Sam.'_

Cas opened his mouth to respond, but paused and tilted his head first. Yeah, he was listening. "We can't wait too long. Ascension is an involved process."

Dean nodded, and as soon as he took the last swallow of his beer, Cas was gone again. He took the lantern with him.

"Dean, please, don't do this," Sam said. Cas was gone, and so was his anger. "We'll find another way."

"Can we?" Dean wondered. Honestly, he'd love it if they could. But he could almost feel the clock ticking. They were running out of time on so many things. "I'm open to whatever you can find, Sammy. But you'd better hurry up." He wandered off to get another beer, and to think.

Dean knew, honestly, he'd done a lot of good for the world. But he'd also done a lot of terrible things, and he wasn't sure he could ever be forgiven for some of them. Nor should he be. He didn't forgive himself. Would it pay back any of the evil shit he's done if he did this? He wasn't sure. Maybe nothing could ever make that right. But it was a start.

He went back to his room, which was kind of spare. Dean was not big on decorating, but then again, he spent most of his life living in various motel rooms. He had his albums, he had his books, he had some porn … all he needed, really. Which was sad, right? Like, super pathetic. Dean sat on his bed and wondered what he'd miss. Or, more to the point, would anyone miss him?

Sam. The answer was always going to be Sam. And that was it.

If he wasn't here, maybe Sam could finally have a life. He wouldn't have to do the damn Winchester thing. He could live like a normal person for once, not in some goddamn bunker library with his brother. And if he was Death, he could hunt to his heart's content, couldn't he? He wouldn't even have to expend any effort to put a hurt on the demons. He could be the one thing he was trained to be, do the one thing he was genuinely good at. He was a born and raised Hunter, and this would allow him to do nothing but.

Dean was finishing his beer when Cas popped into existence in front of his television. "Just in time."

"I don't feel good leaving Sam out of this," Cas said, surprising him. "He will be angry."

Dean shrugged. He was kind of surprised, but letting go of this life didn't seem so bad. Not if he could do some good in the next one. "He's gonna be angry regardless. He doesn't wanna admit it, but this is gonna be as good for him as it is for me."

Cas actually looked doubtful. "I don't think he'll see it that way."

"He will. Eventually. It'll take some time."

Suddenly, the door to Dean's room opened, and there stood Sam in the doorway. "I knew it."

Dean levered himself off his bed with a sigh. "Sam …"

Sam ignored him and rounded on Castiel. "Are you really saying there's no other way to bring back Death? That the angels are powerless?"

"Yes. There are very specific rules, even some we cannot break."

"You're talking about turning him into a Horseman. He won't be Dean anymore, he'll be Death."

"He'll be Dean as Death. I'll make sure of it."

Dean grabbed Sam's arm, to pull him away from Cas, but he shrugged off his grip with surprising ease. "How can you promise that? You're taking him over for Christ's sake."

"I'm only there to make sure Dean survives Ascension. I have no intention of negating his will." Cas put a comforting hand on Sam's arm, which was weird for all sorts of reasons, especially because such Human gestures were still strange for him. He rarely if ever got them completely right. Even Sam seemed momentarily taken aback by it.

"I'll be in the driver's seat, right?" Dean asked, just to make sure.

Cas nodded. "Of course."

Sam turned, facing Dean. "You can't."

Dean clapped him on the arm. He was technically bigger than him, but he was always going to see Sam as his little brother, no matter what. "It's okay. I promise you, it's gonna be okay."

Sam grabbed his arm, squeezed it for emphasis. His eyes were both panicked and sad. "No. Dean, there's still time. We'll figure something out."

Dean smiled, and couldn't help but feel a little sad. This felt like a goodbye. But in that case, he had to be strong for Sam. "Trust me." He looked over Sam's shoulder, and met Cas's eyes. Even he looked a little sad. "I consent."

* * *

"No!" Sam shouted. His first impulse was to pull Dean out into the hall, even though that would make no difference. It was too late anyway.

A blinding white light filled the room, making Sam raise his arm to protect his eyes, and when the light died as suddenly as it began, Sam found himself alone in the room.

No, that was a lie. Cas was gone, and Dean was unconscious on the floor. "Dean," he said, dropping to his knees. Dean's empty beer bottle rolled under his bed, and Sam had a brief moment of déjà vu. Dean didn't do it all the time, but every now and then, after a particularly hard or ugly case, he'd come to Dean's motel room and find him passed out, surrounded by empties, looking like a cut scene from Leaving Las Vegas. He didn't want to call him an alcoholic because that seemed unfair, but he definitely self-medicated, and had since he was … fifteen? Sixteen? Since he began hunting in earnest. That was no coincidence.

Dean's eyes opened, but even though they appeared the same as they always had, he knew it wasn't Dean looking out of them. Sam blinked back tears of rage, and said, "You make sure no one hurts him, understand me? I'm going to hold you to that."

Castiel nodded, and shut his eyes. When they opened again, Sam knew it was Dean looking out of them. He'd known his brother too long. "See? All good."

Sam stood, and gave Dean a hand up. "I can't believe you were gonna go behind my back to do this."

"I didn't want to argue anymore. The time for talking has passed. Now we gotta do something." Dean looked around the room, even though nothing was different, and Sam wondered if he felt different. When Gadreel was secretly riding him, he felt strange, but he always chalked it up to his injuries.

"You okay?"

"Yeah. I feel great. That's the weird thing." Dean suddenly cocked his head, like Cas sometimes did, and it was a little eerie. "Cas said it was because I was supposed to be the Michael sword. I was made to be an angel host." Dean scowled. "Fuck, that's depressing. Don't ever say that again."

Oh good. Now Dean and Cas were going to argue, and Sam was only ever going to hear one side of it. That would get old real fast. "What's our next move?"

Dean opened his mouth to say something, and paused, as obviously Cas was saying something to him. But Dean shook his head. "No, we get Rowena first. She still has the Book of the Damned, and the sooner we get that back and toss it in the forbidden vault, the better."

Sam actually couldn't argue with that. The book was dangerous, and Rowena was dangerous. Together, they were an immediate and terrible threat. "I have some ideas on that front," Sam said. He felt like the whole Rowena thing was totally his fault, so he wanted to make up for it if he possibly could.

He hoped there was still time for that.

* * *

At first, Crowley's people balked at fighting with the angels. But after a death or two, they fell right into line, just as he suspected. None of them were thrilled with the Darkness, it was just they had to protest, because, ugh, angels. He totally got that. And if there were any other choice to be had, he would've made it.

He was strategizing, figuring they'd battle on the ground and leave the airborne bullshit to the angels, when he felt the world shift.

It was a feeling of power, of magic so dark it was tearing at the fibers of the universe, and when Crowley looked up, he knew two things. One, that this was his mother's doing, and two, that he was trapped. "Hello, Fergus," she said.

Crowley found himself trapped in a summoner's circle, of a type he had never encountered before. It was made up completely of salt and blood, and not even the goat's blood kind. This was Human blood. And even worse than that, virgin blood. He could see the corpses in the corner, two men and one child, probably a boy, throat slit open so wide he was nearly decapitated.

As best he could tell, this was happening in a burned out church, as what remained of the walls and floors was black, and there were huge holes in what was left of the roof. Bad shit had happened here; he could feel it against his skin like sandpaper. She'd picked a site of intense violence and black magic, which just figured.

Crowley tried to access his power, but found himself completely cut off this time. Not only that, but he felt dizzy, and collapsed to one knee. This whole time, she was throwing out both Aramaic words and some kind of pidgin Enochian. He saw she was reading from the Book of the Damned, which was on the burned out remains of an altar, and next to it was … holy shit, was that the demon tablet? "What are you doing to me?"

She glanced up from the book and gave him a ghoulish smile. "I'm turning you mortal, my dear. And not just mortal. I'm making sure you'll turn your true age when you become Human. Do you know how old that will make you? That's a genuine question. I stopped counting my birthdays after I hit two hundred. There's really no point, is there?"

"You can't do that," he gasped, but yeah, she could. He could feel all the strength leaving him, and could hear his own bones creaking. "For fuck's sake, what's the point of this?"

"Well, dearie, you should have guessed by now, but you were a real disappointment to me. You can't even run Hell correctly. So I'm going to take over, and do a damn sight better job than you ever did. With Earth in the condition it's in, I should be running that too within a week. Has anyone even tried talking to the Darkness? I'm sure it can be bought. Everything can either be bought, controlled, or destroyed. All three if you're lucky."

"You're deranged," he said, finding it increasingly difficult to even form words. "I should have put you in a home."

"You should have been a King, and not the Winchester's little bitch." She went back to chanting, and lit some consecrated remains on fire, filling the air with the acrid scent of charred meat and burned bones. That should have been appealing, but Crowley found it sickening, and actually gagged a little, spitting out bile on the bloodied pentagram. He watched the skin on the back of his hand start to shrivel.

Suddenly a gunshot rang out, and his mother staggered away from the book, grabbing her chest. Sam Winchester came through the burned doorway of the church, cocking a big ass gun. "Moose, I've never been so happy to see you," Crowley gasped. He wasn't sure he heard him.

"How dare you!" Rowena snapped, and waved a hand in Sam's direction. Nothing happened, and she seemed surprised.

"Witch trap bullet," Sam said. "Did you think only demon traps existed?"

She scowled at him, and put her hand over the bullet wound. She closed her eyes in concentration, and after a second, flung her hand away. A bloodied bullet flew across the room.

Sam had reloaded the gun, but before he could fire, she spat out a spell and he went flying right back out of the church, as if hit by an invisible wrecking ball. "Bloody pests," she grumbled. "I should turn them into goldfish."

Moving with a grace and silence Crowley never would have attributed to him, Dean had snuck through a hole in the rear wall, and was creeping up on Rowena. Crowley deliberately didn't look in his direction, as he didn't want to tip Squirrel off to her.

It didn't matter. She must have sensed him, as she turned and barked out a spell. Squirrel managed to throw something at her before he went sailing into and through the damaged rear wall.

Rowena swallowed a scream and grabbed her face as whatever Dean hit her with bubbled and boiled her skin, turning it red and raw where it hit. It wasn't holy water, but probably something quite like it. Crowley thought it smelled faintly metallic. "Oh, you little bitch," she grated through clenched teeth. "I'm going to flay you alive for that."

Sam had managed to crawl back into the church. He was bleeding from the mouth and nose, and seemed to grimace with every movement, but he wasn't giving up yet. That was one thing you had to give to the Winchesters, as annoying as they were. They were tenacious little bastards. They were ticks who burrowed into your skin and refused to let go.

Belatedly, Crowley realized Sam was saying something under his breath. It was a spell, and he wiped blood from his own mouth before forming his hand into a fist. Blood magic. Crafty Moose!

"Oh no you don't," Rowena said, as she must have felt it. She raised her hand and held it outward, picking Moose up off the floor and leaving him hanging there, like a marionette dangling on slack strings. She began to incant a spell that Crowley knew well. It was one for organ liquefaction. A nasty, slow death. She stopped spellcasting for a second just to rub it in. "I can't tell you how long I've been waiting to do this to you, you arrogant little berk."

Moose could no longer enchant, as he was coughing up lumpy gouts of black and red blood. But Crowley felt a rush of strength, and belatedly realized the spell Moose had thrown had distorted the super-powered demon trap holding him here. Not enough for him to break free, not yet, but if Rowena kept concentrating on a Winchester assault, it may have been enough.

Squirrel was back on his feet, blood gushing from a deep gash on his scalp and turning half his face crimson, but his expression was odd. It took Crowley a moment, but he realized it wasn't actually Dean. It was Castiel looking out through his eyes. How in the hell did he end up inside Squirrel?

He moved even more quietly than Dean had, and she turned with a curse on her lips as Squirrel/Castiel came up to her.

She got out a single word of a spontaneous combustion spell when Castiel put his fingers on her forehead, and her eyes exploded in their sockets. She'd opened her mouth to scream, and that was the last thing she did, as Castiel had already pumped enough angel fire through her to turn her brains to soup. She fell to the charred church floor like a hundred pound bag of dog shit, smoke still rising from her eye sockets.

Sam hit the floor, still horking up blood, until Castiel /Squirrel walked over to him and put his hand on his head. Instantly healed, Moose sat back on his haunches, wiping blood from his chin. "That coulda gone better."

"You angels don't believe in foreplay, do you?" Crowley said, looking back at the corpse of his mother. Her skull was still smoking.

"Nobody puts a spell on me," Castiel said. Only it was Squirrel's voice, which made it all the more confusing.

Castiel/Squirrel came up to the summoning circle, and smeared it with his foot, completely releasing its hold on Crowley. He stood up, straightened his jacket, and hoped his hair was all right. It was humiliating enough being rescued by the God squad; he didn't need to look bad on top of it. "I knew that will they/won't they stuff wouldn't go on forever, but when I expected you and Dean to hook up, it wasn't like this. What happened?"

Castiel/Squirrel cocked his head, giving him a puzzled stare. Yep, that was Castiel. "It's a long story."

"Is he all right?" Sam asked, standing up and retrieving his gun.

"Dean? He's unconscious, but he'll be fine." Castiel finally noticed the blood dripping off his face, and put a hand up to the gash on the side of Squirrel's head. When he removed his hand, it was gone.

Crowley held out his hands in open invitation, and asked, "How long a story?"

Moose cut between them, headed for the altar. "Dean killed Death. He's inheriting the mantel. Cas is keeping him alive through Ascension."

"Apparently not that long," Castiel said.

"Dean is becoming a Horseman?" Now he really felt out of the loop. A Human becoming a Horseman was not only unprecedented, but Crowley was pretty sure it was impossible, even though Dean definitely had the temperament for it. Still, if Castiel was letting Moose and Squirrel have a sliver of hope, why should he puncture their bubble? "Wow. That makes so much sense. When you said Heaven was taking care of the Death situation, Cas, you really buried the lede."

Castiel continued giving him that puzzled look, but on Dean's face it was kind of hilarious. Crowley turned and saw Moose had retrieved the Book of the Damned. "I'll take the demon tablet."

Moose snorted, like he was making a joke. "I don't think so."

"And you think I'm letting you people take it, after you've done such a good job of taking care of it?"

Castiel walked over, holding out his hand. "Can I have it?"

Moose, to his credit, gave him a deeply suspicious look. "To what end?"

"To do what should have been done with it a long time ago."

So vague. Angels loved that shit. Language was beautiful and precise, and they had to muck it up with lies that weren't lies. It really looked like Moose was going to object, but he gave it to him. "Don't make me regret it."

"You won't," Castiel said, and then disappeared into thin air. He was back in the blink of an eye, but when he returned, he was soaked. He was dripping water like he'd just climbed out of a carnival dunk tank.

"What did you do?" Moose asked.

"I dropped it in the Marianas Trench."

Moose shook his head. "Dean's gonna be pissed. That's his favorite jacket."

"This?" Castiel asked, looking down at it. Crowley understood that reaction, because it was a ridiculous leather jacket. Tailored, maybe given a bit of style, it would have been okay, but it made Dean look like a total burnout.

Well, once he started Ascension, he'd be a charred corpse. That'd just complete the look.


	6. Dam That River

**_6 – Dam That River_**

Sam knew he was taking as long as humanly possible to secure the Book of the Damned in the forbidden vault. But he also had no desire to move any faster. In fact, he wished he could stop time completely.

Because Cas was eager to get this whole Ascension thing started, and seemed to either not notice or just ignore the fact that Dean's time as a Human could now be counted in minutes. Sam guessed that if he were alive, his anxiety about this would be in the stratosphere, but at the moment it had a weird removed quality to it. He could see his anxiety, examine it from all angles, and yet could neither dismiss it or experience it entirely. He was starting to feel death in bits and pieces, even if it couldn't fully commit.

This was it, wasn't it? He was going to be saying goodbye to Dean for good. He knew eventually this would happen, one way or another, but it still hurt. Dean was pretty much the only family he had ever had. Dad was more of a myth to him, and he couldn't remember Mom. Dean was his constant. He had no idea what he was going to do without him, but he was going to find out soon enough.

Sam finally returned to the main room, where Dean was looking at an array of weapons spread out across the table. Despite the fact that Dean was probably going to miss the beginning of the fight, he was setting out an arsenal for Sam, as he wanted him to be equipped for any contingency. And there were a lot of contingencies to choose from.

The Darkness could attack in its basic form, as a wall of solid black smoke. It could possess people in masses and make them attack, like Dawn of the Dead finally started to happen. It could also possess animals en masse, and bring to life everyone's favorite nightmare of zombie bears and wolves. As Cas pointed out, before Dean regained consciousness and took over the conversation, Sam couldn't be more dead, but he could be dismembered. Which was a fair point Sam hadn't considered before. And now that he had, he wanted a suit of armor, but that might not be practical. He kept imagining himself as the Black Knight from Monty Python and The Holy Grail, and suddenly it wasn't funny anymore.

He joined Dean in looking over the table of weapons. There were shotguns, pistols, machetes, knives, silver bullets, bullets full of rock salt, mystically imbued daggers, amulets and talismans. Salt and silver probably wouldn't work against the Darkness, but Cas actually wasn't sure, so they figured what the hell. Might as well try the old standbys. "I'm gonna need a bigger boat," Sam finally said.

"They'll fit in the trunk," Dean said, with a great deal of confidence. "And the back seat." After a pause, he added, "The passenger seat will be open."

Sam nodded, and grabbed a duffel bag, which was where all the ammo would be going. It wasn't the best system in the world, but it would have to do. "Our lives are ridiculous."

"No shit." Dean said it with a big smile on his face. He loved stuff like this.

Dean started packing up the knives in a hard case container, as that was generally the best way to handle a buttload of them, but he paused and stared at Sam. He noticed this out of the corner of his eye, but Sam didn't stop packing. "I'll be joinin' the fight. Save me a seat."

Sam nodded, clenching his teeth. All he could think was Dean was not coming back, despite his big talk, and despite Cas's assurances. He would be Death, a Horseman. Not Human, not his brother, not anymore. It seemed worse than death.

Dean grabbed his arm, making him look in his direction. "Sam, I'm serious. I'm coming back. I'm not leaving you alone to fight them."

"I know."

"You don't trust me."

"I trust you. I don't trust the angels."

Dean nodded. It was still him, he knew this was reasonable. Hopefully Cas was keeping his mouth shut. "I've been to Hell, and I've been to Purgatory. I survived them both. No fucking way is Heaven punching my ticket. It isn't happening. You get me?"

Sam met his eyes and nodded, and swallowed back the lump in his throat. "I'll be waiting for you." Cas had told him he could accompany them to Heaven, but he couldn't stay. Humans weren't allowed at Ascensions. The fact that Dean was being allowed in at all, even though he was the one to Ascend, was a massive breach of protocol.

It wasn't that Sam didn't trust Castiel either, because of all angels, he trusted him the most. But Cas had been lied to again and again by his own people. What he could do to stop of any of this was unknown, probably even to him. This whole thing was uncharted territory, and it reeked to Sam. He had a bad feeling he couldn't shake.

But then again, he was dead. Everything felt wrong.

Dean stopped to take a slug from a whiskey bottle – because of course he would – and then grabbed one of the knapsacks they were using for the bigger guns. "It's gonna be okay, Sammy. You'll see."

* * *

Once again, Dean hated lying to Sam. But he could see how this was haunting him, and he didn't want to add to his burdens. He needed to focus on this fight.

It took a while, but Dean finally got Cas to admit the most likely outcome to the Ascension was death. Not becoming Death, but actual dying. It was an uphill battle from the jump. Dean was used to those, so he probably wasn't as alarmed by the prospect as he should have been, but there was no way he was cluing in Sam.

Also, according to Cas, Rowena fractured his skull (although Cas fixed it.). He wasn't telling him that either. You had to pick your battles.

Just like the battle he was ignoring, as Cas suggested he probably shouldn't be drinking before Ascension, but fuck that. He was going to be as numb as possible. Even Cas couldn't argue with that. Well, not for long, at any rate. Couple of big swallows and Cas was more casual about things.

Was this his last day as a Human? Cas's answer was "yes and no", but he was sounding a little drunk, and Dean wasn't sure how seriously to take him. When Dean pressed, Cas had to admit he didn't know. Still sounded kinda drunk. What a lightweight.

Dean felt something like a twist in the wind, which was really odd since there was no wind in here, but Cas knew what it was. And sure enough, Hannah was standing in the center of the room, waiting for them. Dean thought she always dressed a bit like a casual librarian, and today was no different. Neat earth tone suit, flats, sensible haircut. Still kinda hot. ' _Hey,'_ Cas warned.

"It can't be time yet," Sam said.

"I'm afraid so."

Dean took another swallow of whiskey, and then dropped the bottle on the table. "Okay, let's get this rodeo started."

"Just like that?" Sam asked.

With Cas in him, Dean now got a sense of Sam's emotions, and he didn't want to. He didn't want to believe Sam was kind of relieved he was dead, he didn't want to know Sam was mostly worried about losing the last piece of his family. And also? A little relieved too. Dean knew he and Sam had a love/hate thing going on. They always had, and they always would. That was family, pretty much.

' _Not really … is it?'_ Cas asked.

' _Totally, dude. You should know that from Claire.'_

Dean almost faked a smile, then figured fuck it. "There's no point in drawing this out. It's almost war time."

' _I don't hate Claire,'_ Cas said. _'I don't understand her.'_

' _Welcome to teenagers.'_

Sam was giving him that worried mother hen look that he had down pat, and number three of his twelve sad looks (his favorite was number ten). "You're gonna do this macho bullshit stuff to the end, huh?"

Dean just shrugged. He couldn't argue with the assessment. "If I was any different, you'd know it wasn't me."

Sam couldn't argue that either.

Hannah joined them at the table, and she did something really weird. She put a hand on Dean's face, and stared into his eyes so fiercely he could almost feel her gaze in the back of his skull. There was something like tears in her eyes, although she was an angel, so it was hard to tell. "Oh, Castiel," she said, and it was so full of sorrow it felt like a knife in the gut.

Castiel shut down his emotions fast, but Dean got a glimpse, enough to know that he and Hannah had a kind of a thing (was that allowed in angel circles?), and Cas had been lying to him about something. But hey, families lied to each other, right? They all had to have their secrets.

To Dean's surprise, Castiel spoke through him for a moment. "It has to be this way."

"I wish it didn't," she said.

He felt reality twist, and suddenly they were in sunshine, on a stone path in front of small house with rice paper walls. Dean looked around, and they seemed to be in a garden of some sort. The air was painfully clean, and that was Dean's tip off that this was Heaven.

Instead of standing in front of him, Hannah was off to his left, and Sam was off to his right. He thought he heard birds somewhere, but he didn't see any. A water fountain burbled away, and he could hear the sound of one of those weird wooden wind chime things, that sounded like someone hitting a block. "Say your goodbyes now," Hannah said. "You don't have much time."

"Why not?" Sam said. From his posture alone, Dean could tell he was getting angry. "You're acting like you're doing us a favor."

"I am," Hannah replied, not at all cowed by angry Sam. "No Human should be here."

"And then what happens?" Dean asked.

"Castiel knows." She twisted her lips like his name caused her pain.

' _Okay, Cas, I gotta ask –'_

' _The danger isn't only to you.'_

' _She's acting like this is an execution.'_

' _It isn't.'_

Cas answered that so fast, Dean knew it was at least some kind of lie. But it was too late to turn back now. Dean turned to Sam, and said, "Go kick some Darkness ass for me. But save me some 'kay? Somebody's gotta pay for the cracked windshield."

Sam grimaced, partly in amusement and partly in pain. "You wouldn't be Dean without the attitude. Okay." Sam then hugged him, which was as weird and awkward as it always was, but Cas thought it was nice. Cas was one of those sloppily emotional drunks though. "No matter what, you keep fighting," Sam whispered to him. "Don't let go."

"You too." Dean slapped him on the back and let him go, ignoring Cas, who was on the verge of weepy.

Sam said, "Cas, I'm holding you to your promise. You hear me?"

' _What promise?'_ Dean wondered.

Cas didn't answer his thought, but he talked to Sam. "I haven't forgotten."

Hannah gave Cas/him one last sad look, then touched Sam's arm, and the pair of them disappeared.

"You're never gonna tell me, are you?" Dean said. It wasn't really a question.

' _Sam's advice is good,'_ Cas replied. _'Don't stop fighting.'_

"I won't if you don't," Dean said, taking a step towards the little house. It looked barely big enough to hold a Port-A-Potty. How could it be the site of the Ascension thing? But Dean knew, because Cas knew. He was supposed to walk inside. "And then what?"

' _Nothing. It will happen.'_

"Just like that? Hell of a party trick." Part of Dean really didn't want to make the five steps to the door. Part of him wanted to run, even though there was no place to run.

' _Not true,'_ Cas said. _'If you want to go, we'll go.'_

"And Death doesn't exist, and the Earth goes tits up?"

' _There will be a little time before it does.'_

Dean took a deep breath, enjoying the clean air, and knew that while that would be the safest play, he couldn't do it. He had to take one for the team here. He killed Death. It was all his fault. He had to fix this if he could.

' _It wasn't all your fault,'_ Cas said. _'Many bad decisions led to here and now.'_

Dean snorted a laugh at that. You could probably say his entire life was a series of bad decisions. Suddenly he remembered meeting Famine in that greasy spoon so many years ago, and the bastard telling him he was empty and broken. "Was that why Famine had no effect on me? Was I always supposed to be a Horseman?"

' _No. No Human has ever been a Horseman. It's unheard of.'_

"There's a first time for everything, isn't there?" Dean looked at the narrow rice paper door, so dainty and innocuous, and wondered what was on the other side. "Thanks for being willing to back my play, Cas, but let's get this done."

He stepped towards the door and slid it open. It was rice paper all right, and felt as flimsy as a one dollar taco. And while he thought he saw nothing inside, as soon as he stepped over the threshold, Dean felt himself falling into intense white light, both way too hot and way too cold.

And in an instant, Dean lost his mind.


	7. Bear Away

_**7 – Bear Away**_

Crowley tried to remember the last time he was in London. Was it '82? Something like that. The Thatcher years had been a real boom time for him, as people couldn't sell their souls fast enough. Since these things were cyclical, he was pretty sure the city was ripe for harvesting, as he had a feeling the new boss was going to be great for business. You could smell desperation in the air.

Well, mostly it was smoke at the moment, because half the city was on fire. London wasn't alone in having Great Fire number two, as most major cities worldwide were burning. Governments had been overthrown, the economy had broken wide open, and everything was burning. Humans were not coping well with their new reality, which would also be damn good for business. Now, these silly buggers just needed to die again, so he could collect all these wonderful, juicy souls.

He was within spitting distance of the West End, where there were poncy shows for posh people. The fact that it wasn't burning went to show you how much respect the British still had for the arts.

There were no cars on the street, except for ones crashed, turned upside down, or on fire. He walked down the center, unmolested, and shouted, "Forget it brothers, you can go it alone!" Would anyone even get that reference now? People just had no respect for the classics.

Dean probably would have gotten the reference. But he was probably dead now. And genuinely dead, not claimed by the Darkness but still walking around bullshit, because Heaven was a special snowflake and had their own system. Cas was probably still alive, for the moment. He'd die last, and he'd die hard, knowing he'd failed. Angels really took that kind of thing hard for some reason. That whole impressing daddy complex.

Crowley felt eyes on him, and couldn't help but grin. They probably thought he didn't know. They probably also thought he was alone.

The Darkness was big and nasty, hunger and chaos without surcease, but they were also intensely stupid. He bet that was true of the band as well, although he couldn't say for sure, as he'd never met them.

A black cloud, hanging low over the buildings, proved itself not to be fire smoke by moving snake like towards him, skimming the tops of buildings and surging towards the street like a sentient wave. Finally Darkness possessed people began to come from the buildings as well. Whoever they were – male, female, or other; young, old, or indeterminate – they all looked roughly the same. Black smoke drifted from their eyes, their nose, their mouths, and their veins bulged black, like there was a fire inside them raging unchecked. They were stronger than they looked, but the host bodies had a tendency to rip apart under the strain. In fact, he saw a little kid, maybe ten, already bleeding from the shoulder blade, a pressure point starting to separate.

By the time Crowley stopped walking, there were at least two dozen possessed waiting for him at the end of the street, a swirl of uncontainable Darkness above them, coiled like a snake ready to strike. He gave them his best grin, and said, "You're the welcoming committee, huh? I can't help but feel a little cheated. You couldn't have put out for a party sub or a few beers?"

They just stared at him. No sense of humor. How could anything be more humorless than angels? You wouldn't think the universe could bear it.

"Let me clue you in on a few things, okay?" Crowley continued. "The Earth isn't yours anymore. You had a chance, you blew it, you got your ass handed back to you by the feather brigade. That's just embarrassing. How do you have the nerve to show your faces again?"

There was a noise like the wind roaring through an empty skull, and after a moment, Crowley recognized it as a voice. "Ours."

He shook his head. "Nope. You need to go back to whatever hole you crawled out of. There's no room at the inn, sunshine."

"Ours," they said again.

Crowley rolled his eyes. "I feel embarrassed for you, you know that? You're letting down the evil side in a big, big way."

The group started lurching towards him, a drunken stagger step that suggested they hadn't been controlling them long enough to get the hang of bipedal ambulatory systems. "I think you're confused. You don't seem to know who I am." Crowley whistled sharply.

Behind him, the sky suddenly turned black with swarms of demons, plunging into buildings, taking human hosts unclaimed by the Darkness. The demons of London who already had hosts flooded the street behind him, and there was the soft noise of padding paws on the asphalt. Just by the volcanic breathing, he knew his favorite Hellhound, Buffy, had sidled right up to him. She was a beautiful beast, seven feet tall from claws to crown, as red as old blood, with three beautiful black eyes and a gigantic mouth with three rows of pristine white fangs. He felt bad for all those who couldn't see her. She was a gorgeous nightmare. He patted her side. "I'm the King of Hell, and I told you to leave. I don't give people second chances." He glanced back at his demons, impressed by their number. They were easily double the Darkness, and they hadn't all arrived yet. "All great military operations need a name, don't they? How does Operation Hell On Earth strike you? Too flamboyant, or just flamboyant enough?"

The Darkness had paused. They had no facial expressions whatsoever, but he got the sense they were confused. It was so hard to be that stupid.

He gave Buffy a final pet, and checked to make sure the rest of her pack was here. Yep. All eighteen of them.

Crowley gave the Darkness a sarcastic little wave goodbye. "Sic 'em, darlings."

* * *

Void. All was void. Empty darkness, yawning, hungry, endless. Broken. Empty, broken. Eternity was empty and empty was all and oblivion was everything and everything was nothing. Everything hurt and nothing mattered.

Down. Falling down forever, into a hunger that could never be fed, an emptiness that could never be filled, a void that expanded to encompass everything. Forever falling, nothing to grab onto, all was lost, all was broken and empty and meaningless. Nothing but pain. Pain like a scream, attached to nothing, going nowhere and meaning nothing. Pain was pain was pain was.

("Dean.")

Nothing. Was nothing. It was all black and meaningless and empty. Everything was the void. The void was the beginning and end, the start and the finish, the being and nothingness. The void was pain and the void was all. There was nothing but empty shells, empty shells made only to feel pain and feed a nothing that could never be fed.

("Dean, you need to focus on my voice.")

Screaming. There was screaming, and it was everywhere and nowhere, close and far. It was in the void, but couldn't fill the void, because the void couldn't be filled. It echoed into eternity and came back around, and it was never enough. It could never be enough.

("Dean, focus.")

What the hell was that? That was nothing. Nothing on nothing on nothing. More screams from the void. Unfettered, full of pain, bleeding into the darkness, filling the void that couldn't be filled.

("I am here. I need you to reach out to me.")

It needed to stop. The pain, the screaming, the void. It couldn't stop. It needed to stop. There were threads in the darkness, black on black on black, all tunneling down, veins of the void, reaching towards a bottom that simply didn't exist. The void was everything and the void was endless, and the void was filled with so much pain, but never enough. There could never be enough.

("Dean, goddamn it, listen to me!")

It felt good to fall and fall and fall. If there was just an end to the screaming, the pain, the void wasn't so bad. Nothing was okay. Nothing was better than something, because something was a lie. It was all lies, a way to dull the screams, a way to forget the pain, but the pain couldn't be forgotten. The emptiness couldn't be filled. The void was the void was the void was the void was.

("Dean!")

The voice … the voice. The voice was someone. The voice couldn't be someone, because no one existed. There was nothing but void, screaming and pain and falling. It was a lie it was all a lie it was all a trap a void a way to a lie to pain to falling.

("Focus on me. Understand? Focus on my voice.")

There was a pinprick of light in the void in the black. It was a lie lie lie lie lie.

("Don't give up.")

There was there was a border to the void. It was a lie lie lie. That way led to more screaming falling pain. That way laid nothing on top of nothing on top of nothing. There was nothing here no one here just lies and void and pain and.

("Dean!")

It was like falling through a ceiling, to hit another ceiling, to hit another ceiling. Pain like shards of glass being pounded into his brain with a claw hammer, and so much screaming. Why was there so much pain in the void, and so much screaming? So empty, so much nothing so much so much …

And just like that, Dean snapped back into his body. Or maybe not. He didn't know anymore.

It was a long time before he was able to put together a coherent thought, or to recognize Dean was his name. He was on a wooden floor, in a vast pool of blood. He was watching it spread out crimson over the slats, watched dust motes dance in sunlight, and saw books piled haphazardly near a window with peeling paint. After much time had glided away, he realized he was in Bobby's house, even though he didn't know who Bobby was right now.

"What in the holy ever loving fuck was that?" Dean asked, when he finally remembered how. His voice sounded like a rusty gate, and he felt blood congealing in the back of his throat. Oh, so he was the one doing all the screaming. That made sense.

He thought his arm hurt, but after more time slid away like an ice cube melting in the sun, he realized it was Cas still holding on to him. His grip was so tight his fingers hadn't unlocked yet. It took him another ice cube's worth of time to realize who Cas was, and how it was his voice trying to find him in the void. You'd think he'd have been tired of pulling him out of deep, bad shit by now.

Dean was lying on the floor, but Cas was sitting beside him, slumped against the base of Bobby's couch. It hadn't been a joyride for him either, as he wasn't moving, and Dean was pretty sure he wasn't conscious for a while. Either he hadn't heard his question, or simply couldn't answer it.

Dean was trying not to move too, mostly because it felt like his organs had been removed and replaced with broken glass. All his bones had shattered, and he was pretty sure he lost the top of his skull, although, again, that probably wasn't true. Or maybe it was. No way to tell down here on the floor.

Dean tried to lift his head, and blood drooled out of his mouth, widening the pool in increments. The pool had a shape, and he tried to prop himself up to have a better look at it, but his arms could barely move, and he hurt so much he was dizzy from it, his brain reeling around his skull like a broken carnival ride. Finally he saw that the huge pool of blood was shaped like a wing, and after more time glided away, he realized Cas had had a wing ripped off pulling him out of the void. No wonder he was unconscious. On the very narrow plus side, most of the blood probably wasn't Dean's, so that was something.

He collapsed back into the blood and just lay there, unable to work up the strength to do much else. Cas coughed, letting him know he was still alive, and now awake. He began prying his own fingers off Dean's arm. "Are you all right?" Cas asked.

"No," Dean responded, as soon as he was able to. "How the hell am I still alive?"

"I don't know."

"How are you still alive?"

"I don't know."

"Well, good. As long as we're all on the same page."

Cas finally let go of his arm, and Dean half expected to fall through the floor, but he didn't. He almost wanted to. "We're not done here, are we?"

"No. This is barely underway."

Dean wanted to laugh, but couldn't. Great, so their first round with Ascension was a total TKO. He didn't think they'd survive round two. Maybe they could just stay here and bleed to death on Bobby's floor. There were worse ways to go.

He tried to remember what actually happened to him, but couldn't. It was like his brain just exploded, there was so much … something. Input, output, pain, something. (Nothing.) He was everywhere and nowhere. It was the most hideous sensation he had ever been subjected to, and he had a fucking epic list of hideous sensations.

Worse yet, he could feel his soul being eaten away, one greedy bite at the time. He was a meal for the crows. They were still peeling his soul clean, and he didn't know you could feel such a thing. Maybe only here, in Heaven's basement.

It was possible more time had passed, but it was an intangible thing here. Time was a concept for an outer world, a better world. Not here. But the blood wing puddle on the floor was wider. "Why aren't you healing?"

"I am, but it's very slow," Cas said. Even his voice sounded weak. That explained why he wasn't even trying to heal him. They were on their own in here, left to their own devices. Which meant Cas was gonna last a lot longer than he was. In fact, Dean thought he'd really like to throw in the towel now, if he knew who to tell.

But it was too late. He was all in, whether he liked it or not, whether or not he'd survive the next five minutes. "What happens now?"

"I don't know. Everything that happens here is autonomic."

That was way too big a word for Dean to understand right now. Even blinking hurt. "There's no way out, is there?"

"Only through. Or death."

"I wish death would hurry the fuck up."

Cas made a noise that may have been an attempt at a laugh. It was amused at any rate. "There are so many things worse than death. And we're going to experience most of them."

"Wow, Crowley's right. You are a buzzkill."

"I'm an angel. Buzzkill is our middle name."

Dean very carefully turned his head and looked up at Cas. He was smiling faintly and looking paler than he had ever seen him. There was a slight possibility he was in shock, if angels could actually experience such a thing. Maybe here they could. "Don't you fucking die on me."

His eyes moved towards him, but his head remained perfectly still. Maybe he was healing, but he was still in pain. "It's not going to be that easy."

"You are just a bundle of good news today." Dean concentrated, and pushed himself up to his elbows. It hurt so much he had to swallow a scream, and he almost collapsed. Had he been pounded flat with a steamroller? He mentally pictured himself as a cartoon coyote, and had no idea where that thought came from.

More blood dribbled from his mouth, and he felt the tiny death of his soul being bitten in two. It was like he was being pulled apart at the molecular level, and sewn back together with cactus needles and a staple gun.

Dean used the couch to climb to his knees, swallowing back even more screams. He felt screamed out right now. Maybe they could check in with him later. His head felt like it was full of helium, like it was in danger of detaching from his neck and floating away. He was going to die here. That thought should have bothered him, but it didn't. Actually, he couldn't wait.

"Dean, don't give up."

"I'm not giving up," he replied, and wasn't sure if that was true. There were so many things he didn't know anymore. Finally he pushed himself up to his unsteady feet, and held his hand down towards Cas. "C'mon, we've got a job to do."

Dean wondered when he'd shatter so irrevocably even Cas wouldn't even be able to put him back together. He was willing to bet that moment was five minutes away.


	8. Drown With Me

_**8 – Drown With Me**_

Sam knew he had to pick both the time and space where he deployed the Belial artifact carefully. He would be damning a particular spot to constant death. Nothing would ever grow there again. But it was better a mile of land died than the whole planet, so certain sacrifices had to be made.

He figured out the best bet was Oak Grove Cemetery, on the far outskirts of town. It was near an industrial area that was pretty well contaminated anyway, and the cemetery itself had gone to seed. It was mostly just a hang out spot for bored Goth teens. They'd probably find everything being mysteriously dead around it a huge turn on.

On his way there Sam stopped to see if anything worked on the Darkness. It was a big fat no on rock salt and silver, but they didn't like the holy water very much, and they absolutely hated the sage smoke. And he made brief notes of this in case there was ever a time when another monster hunter needed to know how to turn back Darkness. And it kept his mind off the fact that Dean and Castiel were probably dying in Heaven right now. Or succeeding. What was the worse case scenario here? He couldn't see Dean becoming a Horseman as an upside, and he tried, he really did. But he would dead, he would be non-human, he wouldn't be Dean anymore. He'd be some kind of creature walking around in his meat suit. He hoped he was wrong. Sam never wanted to be so wrong in his life.

Once he got to the cemetery, he started making a protective circle of salt and started smudging sage in bowls, and when he ran out of those, on tombstones.

He could see the swirling black clouds of the Darkness over the city, as well as an occasional flash of bright light in the higher clouds that precipitated a rain of ash. It was the angels using the lantern, proving that it did indeed work on the Darkness too. It was possible some of that ash was also angels, because they weren't all sweetness and light, but that was for Hannah to deal with.

Sam set up shotguns and the most magically powerful swords he had in a circle around him. He had the fragment of Belial blood wrapped in a silver mesh lined cloth, ready to be broken. But he wasn't going to do that until he had the deepest concentration of Darkness possible.

You'd think since he'd put out all these precautions they'd run away, but the Darkness was particularly malevolent, and liked to go after anyone who targeted it, hence his stopping to see what worked on them on the drive over. He was trying to provoke them into following him, coming after him. The fact that Death was currently missing in action was no deterrent to their attacks. It was hard to say if they didn't know, or just didn't care. Nor was the fact that he was already dead by them any deterrent either.

Black clouds started drifting towards him, and he fired a shotgun into them, trying to make them pour it on. You'd think in such a form bullets wouldn't bother them, but it did, even if it didn't do much in the way of damage.

"How goes it?" a woman's voice asked.

Sam just about jumped out of his skin. Hannah was standing behind him and off to the left a little, near one of the smudge pots. "Shouldn't I be asking you that question?"

She gave the slightest nod of her head, hands clasped primly in front of her. "Crowley has managed to rally the demons, and they have the Darkness cornered in the Urals."

This news was a little baffling. "All the Darkness in Russia?"

"All the Darkness in Europe and Asia."

"Holy shit." Well, you had to give it to Crowley. When he promised to bring the pain, he meant it. And there was a little dagger of hope in him that maybe the Earth didn't die today. It was good, but it was also just a little bit terrifying.

"Yes. Castiel's suggestion to bring him into the fight was genius. No one likes to hurt things more than Hell." She winced ever so slightly saying Cas's name.

Now Sam had an opening to ask. "What was that?"

She looked around. "What was what?"

"Before we left for Heaven, when you were saying goodbye to Cas. That looked permanent."

She glanced down at the smudge pot, and he could see her deliberating on what to say. "It could be. There's no telling the outcome of an Ascension."

"Do you have any idea how it's going?"

She shook her head. "We only know when it's over."

"If he comes through this … will Dean still be Dean?"

She opened her mouth to respond, but froze so suddenly Sam thought a monster might have stepped into view. But no, she was just pondering his words. "I can't say. There's never been a Human Ascended. I don't know what to expect."

"What about Ascended angels? Were they themselves afterward?"

Hannah considered this way longer than Sam was comfortable with. Way, way longer. Finally she said, "Some."

"Some? As in half, two, what?"

She didn't seem to want to answer, but Sam just kept staring at her, refusing to look away. The fact that he was dead and didn't need to blink added an extra layer to her discomfort. "Three."

Sam was glad he was dead, or his stomach would have plummeted. "Out of..?"

"Fifteen."

Horrible odds. Tears wanted to come, but they couldn't, because his eyes stopped being able to do that. Once again, creeping death. It was possible he'd said goodbye to Cas and Dean for good, and he was slowly turning to stone, so he couldn't even feel the true horror of it.

"I have to believe they will be okay," Hannah said, surprising him. "No angel's been resurrected as much as Castiel. There must be a plan for him."

That had already occurred to Sam, when he was back alone in the bunker. "What if the plan was to help usher Dean into being a Horseman? What if his plan ends there?"

She looked so sad. Sam knew then that that very idea had occurred to her as well. "If it does, it does. I just hope it doesn't."

"Yeah, me too." Sam gripped the shotgun tight, and something in him wanted to squeeze the gun and try and make it snap. He should be with Dean, he should be trying to help him, or at the very least be doing even more in the fight against the Darkness. He couldn't even use that spell he picked out for Dean, because he no longer had a life force to offer. "Get the angels to try and send as much Darkness my way as they can."

She raised an eyebrow in surprise. "Why?"

"'Cause when I unleash this, I want it to matter." He simply uncovered the shard.

Just like Castiel, she knew instantly what it was. "Oh, dear. I thought all of that had been purified."

"The angels missed a spot."

"Apparently. Yes, I will let them know."

"Oh, and –"

But before he could say a word, Hannah nodded. "As soon as I know." And then she was gone, in the faintest ruffle of wings.

Sam pulled the spent cartridges out of the shotgun and reloaded it, forcing himself to stay busy and not think about it. "Come on Dean," he said under his breath. "Don't leave me hanging."

* * *

Dean woke up with the mother of all hangovers.

Super bad. Like head splitting like an overripe melon kind of bad. He didn't get up so much as fall out of bed, and spent a minute or two lying on the cool floor, trying to regain his strength. Holy fucking shit, no more Jaegerbombs for him. He was getting too old for that shit.

He crawled to the bathroom, and felt marginally better after puking his guts out, but that was a very slim margin. When he pulled himself up to the sink and looked in the bathroom mirror, he saw he was bleeding from the nose, and had a huge black eye, almost taking up the left half of his face. His lower lip was also torn, and he had blood trickling from a cut at the hairline. And behind him, instead of the motel shower, he saw a startling black void, nothingness gaping wide and calling to him.

Dean turned suddenly, heart hammering in his chest, but there was just a small shower with a tacky blue and white plastic curtain. No yawning chasm of eternal nothingness. With great caution, he turned back to the mirror, only to find his injuries were gone along with that black void. What the hell was that? Was he hallucinating now? Had his drinks been spiked? It wouldn't be the first time that'd happened.

Still, unease took up residence in his gut, and it wasn't the hangover. Something was wrong here, he just didn't know what.

He rinsed his mouth out, and tried to remember the last thing he was doing. He couldn't remember. He couldn't remember a time before this. But his head hurt so much, it was hard to think.

(Void. Why did a void scare him so much?)

Before he could get in the shower and wake up, he heard a brief knock before someone came into his motel room. "Up yet, you idjit?" Bobby asked.

"Bobby?" Dean was still in his boxers, so he headed out to find that yes, it was Bobby, standing there and looking like he was dressed for a day of lumberjacking, not monster hunting.

Bobby scoffed. "Yer not even dressed yet?"

"Dressed for what?"

He shook his head, and gave him the disappointed frown that Dean always hated to see. "Jo's just gonna love that."

"Jo?" The name startled Dean, although he couldn't for the life of him remember why.

There was another brief knock on his door before it was pushed open, and Ellen stuck her head inside. "Hey, are – oh dear God, I never wanted to see Dean's boney knees again."

"My knees aren't boney," he protested, looking down at them. He was standing in a puddle of blood. "What the hell ..?" He looked around to see where the blood might have come from, and why Bobby and Ellen weren't alarmed by it. But when Dean looked back up, they were gone. Looking back down, there was no blood, just his crumpled up jeans. "What the ..?"

Okay, yeah, everything was wrong, and he had no idea what was going on. He stepped into his jeans, hastily pulled them up, and grabbed his shirt off the chair as he headed out the door.

He was expecting a motel parking lot, but it was the void again, a stark plain of nothingness that made him reel back with a strangled cry. (Nothing empty hungry nothing.) He slammed into the mattress and sat down hard, tasting blood. "What the fuck..?" he shouted this time, wanting someone, anyone, to answer him.

But there was no answer. And the door now showed a parking lot, with the Impala parked out front. Dean put his head in his hands, and tried to think. What the hell was going on? Was it the Trickster again? No, wait – he was dead. Or was he? He couldn't remember. He couldn't think at all; his mind felt like a broken box of crockery.

He grabbed the phone off the nightstand, and wedged the receiver against his ear. He needed to call Sam, see if he was having the same –

-the phone squealed. The noise was high pitched and electric, and he felt it like a dental drill to his brain stem. It tumbled to the carpet, and he looked down to see the darkness had eaten the floor. The bed was tipping drunkenly, and he knew suddenly it was trying to find him, like a sentient monster.

(Pain void nothing everything nothing lie pain nothing falling pain lie.)

Dean scrambled back onto the bed, not sure how any of this was happening. What the fuck was going on?!

* * *

Castiel knew something was wrong the moment he opened his eyes, and found himself on the shores of the Indian Ocean.

He sat up on the sand, and watched the waves for a little while. The water was crystal blue here, beautiful, and the beach was abandoned, totally devoid of any Human elements. His only companion was a crustacean in a shallow tidal pool. It had nothing interesting to say.

He was dimly aware of his missing wing; he could still feel the ache of it. He also felt very weak, but that was to be expected. Mutilation usually had a cost.

It occurred to him he could stay here a while, recharge his batteries, but as much as it would help him, he couldn't. He needed to find Dean. He'd just rolled up to his feet when Hannah said, "Leaving so soon?"

But it wasn't Hannah. It visually resembled her, but he knew her energy signature, and that wasn't it. He stared at the fake Hannah, and asked, "Why the charade? You're not her, we both know it."

The fake Hannah smiled. "I come to you in a form you will find friendly."

That made sense. It was a very angel thing to do. "I need to find Dean."

"You don't belong here, Castiel."

"I know, that's why I want to find Dean."

She shook her head. "That isn't what I meant." Behind her, a door appeared in the sand. "You don't belong here. This is Dean's fight, not yours."

"I'm not leaving. Where is he?"

The fake Hannah canted her head like many angels he knew when they didn't understand something. He didn't know this angel's energy signature, and considered the possibility it wasn't a real angel, simply a test of Ascension. "You have a better destiny."

Castiel shrugged. "I gave up on destiny a long time ago."

"You may have given up on yourself, but Heaven hasn't given up on you."

"Heaven should. I've done horrible things." He mentally cast out, seeing if he could find Dean that way, but this was a pocket universe within Heaven itself. His abilities were limited here, otherwise he'd cheat on the test. "Why don't you want me to find him?"

"Have you considered what's best?"

"For whom?"

"Us. Heaven."

Castiel found the question curious, and played it over again in his head, trying to see what he missed. Of course he was weak from blood loss and fighting against the void, but it didn't make sense. "Having Death in the universe is a necessity. There's no arguing that point."

"He can't be Death."

"He's still alive."

"He's a Human," she insisted. As if Castiel had somehow forgotten what species he was. "That doesn't work for us."

That made Castiel smirk. Maybe it was the blood loss, but this seemed comical. "And why do you think I give a flying fuck what Heaven wants?"

Her eyebrows drew together in confusion. "A flying … fuck? What is that ..?"

"I don't care what Heaven wants," Castiel reiterated. "Heaven wanted to end the world."

She straightened up, and crossed her arms over her chest. This she understood. "If we really did, it would have happened."

"Okay, yeah, tell yourself that." Castiel rubbed his forehead, wondering where the exit was. There had to be one, and not just the door behind her. He knew that was a false exit.

"Do you really think your rebellion wasn't planned? Do you really think everything that has happened wasn't always supposed to happen? Are you truly that naïve?"

He threw his hands up. "I don't care anymore. Where's Dean?"

She narrowed her eyes at him. "Dean is not going to survive this. He can't."

"He can with my help." Castiel had to believe that. There was no point in doing any of this otherwise.

"You're half dead already."

"Half is not completely."

She smirked at him, in a way Zachariah once had. He still wasn't sure if this was real, or part of the test. "Who benefits if you both die?"

Castiel considered that a moment. "Heaven. If we die during Ascension, the mantel is defaulted to Heaven. An archangel can simply be assigned the job."

"How does losing you benefit us?"

"It doesn't hurt you either. I'm a neutral element."

She shook her head, and gave him a disappointed frown. He'd gotten those from too many people to remember. "If you still weren't useful to use, you wouldn't be here."

"Good to know. Where's Dean?"

"You're being deliberately difficult."

Castiel was getting tired of this. No, correction, he was already tired of this. "What do you want from me?"

She stepped aside, and swept an arm towards the door. "To leave, now."

"And I've told you that isn't happening."

Her eyes flashed with anger. Literally. They turned blue-white for a moment. "Dean Winchester dies today, for good this time. We no longer have a use for him. You have a very clear choice to make, Castiel. Are you going to choose your own people, or are you stupidly siding with the Humans again? Humans, whom, I might add, have done nothing for you."

"You're wrong. And I'm beginning to think you're not a test at all. Who sent you to sabotage this?"

He didn't think her posture could get any more rigid, but somehow it did. "No one needs to sabotage anything. Dean is destined to die here. You don't have to."

He met her gaze, and told her, "Fuck destiny. Now let me go to Dean."

She shook her head sadly. "You used to be a great General of Heaven. You shouldn't throw your life away so cheaply. You can be great again."

He was so done with this obstruction he got angry, and the brief hit of energy was welcome. "I'm not throwing it away. And if I was, it's mine to throw, isn't it? Now let me go to him"

Her jaw set, and he knew from limited experience with Claire she was becoming belligerent. "I could force you, you know. You're in no shape to fight."

Castiel glared at her, and his one remaining wing flared behind him, while an angel blade dropped into his hand from his sleeve. "Willing to bet on that?"

She arched an eyebrow at him, trying to project confidence, but he caught her doubt. She wasn't a natural fighter, she was from upper management somewhere, one of those angels who kept accounts. Even she knew an angel with nothing to lose was a lot more dangerous than the norm. She had overplayed her hand. He wasn't that weak yet. "You're really throwing it all away for that piece of Human garbage? You are a fool, Castiel."

"If I am, so be it. Now let me go."

Reality was ripped out from underneath him, and he felt himself fall, but falling held no terror for him. Dying for nothing did.

But that's why he and Dean weren't going to die for nothing.


	9. Pushing The River

**_9 – Pushing The River_**

Dean regained consciousness running.

Which would seem impossible, but he had no memory of anything before he suddenly found himself running through a forest, jumping over fallen logs and swerving to avoid trees. He had the sense something big and bad was after him, and had been after him for a very long time. His lungs were burning, and his knee was starting to ache.

He had a handgun in his right hand, and when he turned to look back at what exactly was following him, he saw nothing but darkness. Darkness that was corrosive, eating the woods at it progressed, flowing like water and washing away everything in its path. He emptied the gun into it, but it did nothing. Reality was simply being erased, and why did he think shooting at it would do anything? But he had to do something, right?

He dropped the empty gun back in his pocket, and through a break in the trees ahead, he saw a parking lot and a bar. There was no reason to think that the bar was going to survive this wave of nothing, but he was tired, and he could think of worse places to die.

Dean ran into the bar, ahead of the darkness, and slammed the door, leaning against it and trying to catch his breath. The bar shook, like Godzilla just stomped up to the door, but otherwise nothing happened. He was either erased from existence or he wasn't. Dean was determined not to worry about it until he absolutely had to.

As soon as he was sure he could breathe without wheezing, he straightened up and turned around, ready to give some glib, bullshit line to the bar patrons. But the line died in his throat. The bar was the scene of a massacre.

The blood was almost an inch thick on the floor. There were bodies splayed on tables, on the bar, pieces on the floor, one quartered on the pool table in the back. The first body he came to was Bobby's, his neck cut so deeply his head was attached to his body by his naked spine alone. There was a beer glass full of blood on the table.

This never happened. Why … what was this?

Looking around the bar, he realized he recognized every single person in here. Ellen, Jo, Tessa, Pamela, Rufus, Ash, Lisa, Ben, Kevin, Charlie, Castiel … but he froze as soon as he saw who had been quartered on the pool table.

Sam.

Whoever had done it had been very thorough. They mostly severed his arms at the shoulders and his legs at the hips, stretching them out to expose the bones and the muscles. They sliced him around the midsection until his intestines bulged out, and finished it up with ramming an ice pick through his left eye. The pool table was black with blood, and it was dribbling over the edge. Dean got this sick feeling Sam had lived a long time while he was being sliced up.

And that's when someone slammed a knife right between Dean's shoulder blades.

The pain was immediate and intense, sending an electric shock down his spine, but he reflexively threw back his elbow and caught the fucker, sending him stumbling back. The knife was still in his back, but he viewed that as a minor positive, because he couldn't stab him with it again.

Dean spun, pulling his own knife from a sheath on his belt, and he had just lunged forward to gut the bastard when he realized he was looking at himself.

Fake Dean smiled, aiming a pistol at real Dean's face. Blood was freckled on his cheeks and forehead, and his shirt was black with it, but none of the blood on him was his. "You know what they say about a guy who brings a knife to a gun fight."

"You think you're the first asshole who's worn my face?" Dean spat. "I'm not impressed."

"It's not your face, it's my face," Fake Dean replied. "You're a real piece of work, you know that?"

Dean made a "yap yap yap" gesture with his free hand, and tried to ignore the creeping numbness that was starting to overtake his legs. Blood crawled down his back, and if he was careful about breathing, he didn't feel the knife. "Sing another song, bud, I've heard that one too."

Fake Dean laughed. "Wow, I am such a big bag of dicks. No wonder I've been killed, like, what? Half a dozen times now? You know you're dying now, right?"

"Why don't you come closer and make sure?" He wasn't letting go of his knife. Yeah, dickface had a gun, but all Dean needed was to draw his attention away for a split second. At this distance, he could easily throw the blade and split his skull like a fucking walnut.

Fake Dean gave him a really annoying half-smile. Someone else's blood dripped off his chin. "You know why you're perfect for the Horseman gig, right? 'Cause you will know Dean Winchester by the trail of his dead. You're a plague on humanity."

Dean almost shrugged, but at the last second he felt muscles and skin pull against the knife, and it took everything he had not to react to the pain and give this fucker any satisfaction at all. He could feel a stream of blood running down his leg, puddling at his feet. "Maybe you should have thought about that before you killed these people."

Fake Dean grinned, and showed off the blood on his teeth. "I didn't kill anybody. You did."

"Really? How -" Suddenly Dean had a very clear memory of driving the knife into Bobby's throat, digging in until he cut through cartilage and bone, the blood hot and sticky as it gushed over his hand. And he remembered blindsiding Sam with a right hook, and as soon as he was laid out on the pool table, driving the ice pick into his eye until it punched through to the surface below, pinning him there. He was very precise about location, because he didn't want Sam to die right away. He wanted him to feel what it was like to be dismembered.

"No!" Dean yelled, mentally trying to shove the thoughts away. "That didn't happen! You did this!"

Fake Dean just kept grinning. "And I'm you. We're the snake biting its own tail. Do you really think you should be weaponized? You? America's greatest unknown serial killer?"

Dean opened his mouth to protest, and then he remembered Lisa screaming as he disemboweled Ben right in front of her. "That – that didn't happen," Dean said, even as he realized he wasn't sure anymore. Maybe it did. He could still hear the noise of his guts hitting the floor.

"You came back from Hell so broken," Fake Dean continued. "You never did recover. You got that now, right? That's why you felt so alive and at peace when the demonic side of the Mark of Cain took over. You haven't been Human for so long. If you became Death, you'd be a million times worse. You'd kill and kill, and there'd be nothing to stop you. You'd make the Earth a slaughterhouse."

"No," Dean protested, but it came out as a whisper as he sank to the floor, no longer able to feel his legs. He remembered crushing Charlie's skull with the butt of his pistol. A bit of her brains was still on it. Blood lapped warmly against him, and he felt this hollow pit open up deep inside his chest.

It was true. All of it. He dropped the knife, his hands were too slick with blood, and wasn't sure if he felt like crying or screaming. "I didn't – I was trying to make it right."

Fake Dean crouched down, so he was at his level. His eyes all but glowed with a gleeful malevolence. "You can't make it right. You could live for a million years, and you wouldn't make a single dent in it. You understand that now, yeah?"

He looked at Fake Dean, and realized he was in fact looking at a mirror. It was him; it had always been him. "I –" he wanted to apologize, but he didn't know to who, or how such weak words could convey how truly repentant he was. He wanted to do good, he really did. He didn't know where he'd gone so wrong. But he had, and now he could climb a tower of corpses that he'd created all the way to the sun.

Dean realized there was a gun in his hand. It was different, heavier, loaded. He planted it under his chin, aimed up and slightly back, so he was sure to take the top of his skull off. He'd researched this; he knew the best way to blow his own head off. Dean had considered it more than a few times in his life. He should have done it sooner. How many people would still be alive if he just ate a bullet three years ago?

"No!" Cas suddenly ripped the gun out of his hand, crouching in front of him just like Fake Dean did, before he became a mirror. "You're being influenced, Dean. Someone's trying to sabotage the Ascension."

Dean remembered beating Castiel into a pulpy mess, before driving an angel blade right into the center of his forehead. He was such a sap he never even fought back. "I can't do this," he said. "I can't."

Cas grabbed him by the shoulders, and Dean had the disconcerting sensation of seeing him split in two. Half of Cas was normal; the other has was bruised and bloodied. "What are you seeing right now?"

"My crimes." He looked around the blood soaked floor for another weapon. He didn't want Cas to save him. He wanted to die before he was given the ability to kill everyone.

"This is an empty room."

He looked around, and saw all the corpses, all the blood still dripping off the tables. It smelled like a slaughterhouse. "You're dead, and I'm sorry. I didn't mean to kill you."

"Listen to me, Dean. I'm not dead. You haven't killed me. Someone is messing with your mind."

Dean wondered idly if, hallucination or not, he could get this Cas to kill him. "If I become a Horseman, everyone will pay. I tortured in Hell, and I liked it. I liked being demon possessed. I liked the killing rage of the Mark. I will slaughter with abandon. I cannot be trusted."

"You're wrong."

He shook his head. He was so tired of being alive. What was the point? If he lived, it would just be to create even more atrocities. "You want to know a secret, Cas? I love killing. Nothing feels better to me than ganking some demon. I can't pour enough booze in me to fill that hole. Death is home to me."

"That's not true."

"I'm a monster. I just get more monstrous every passing year. You can't allow me to do this. You have to kill me."

"Please remember this is for your own good," Cas said, and then slapped him across the face.

While Dean felt the sting of it, he just shook his head. "Nobody can be slapped to death, Cas. Not even a Stooge."

Cas scowled, although the bloody side of his face didn't move. "I'm sorry about this." He then pulled out his angel blade, and sliced him across the cheek.

The pain was sharp and bit deep. Reflexively, Dean grabbed Cas's wrist, and a couple of competing urges flashed through his mind. To stab himself in the throat, just puncture his own carotid and be done with all of this, or to jam it in one of Cas's eyes.

Cas pulled his arm free before he could do either, and said, "Look around you. What do you see?"

Dean didn't want to obey, but he did as he asked, just to confirm it for himself. "The same thing as before. Bodies. Haven't you noticed how deep the blood is in here?" But as he glanced back at Cas, the room … flickered. There was no other term for it. Light briefly blinked out, and so did the blood soaked barroom. For a moment, Cas didn't have a bloody face.

Dean's mind reeled. After that brief moment of nothing, everything looked the same as before. Sam vivisected on the pool table, Bobby slumped on the table with a glass of his own blood, Cas dead against the bar –

Cas dead against the bar?

Dean looked between the body and the Cas crouched in front of him, and tried to reconcile this. "Are you wearing his face? You're another angel, right?"

"Dean, it's me." He didn't know if he dared trust that. Cas sighed. "Do I really need to start listing all the porn titles I've seen you order at hotels?"

Okay, yes, this was probably Cas. Dean felt something dripping off his face, and he thought it was more blood, but his fingers pulled away clean. Oh, fantastic, he was sobbing like a fucking five year old. He wiped his face with the back of his hand, then wondered why he'd bothered. Cas had already seen it. Cas also knew some terrible things about him. At least crying made him seem human. "No, I gotcha." Dean looked around to find it was an empty bar. There was no blood anymore. There wasn't even a pool table. "Shit. It was so real. I could even smell it."

"It had to be realistic to be effective." Cas helped him stand, and Dean could no longer feel the knife in his back. Of course not, that was no more real than anything else.

"Effective? Was I supposed to kill myself?"

"I think that was the end goal."

"You can kill yourself in Heaven?"

Cas shrugged. "Just like any place else. It seems illogical, though."

"Yeah." Dean still didn't feel right. His insides were jumbled and broken, and the feeling of a knife anywhere in him might have been preferable. He didn't know why, maybe because he felt so bereft, but he told him, "It was true, you know. All of it."

When Cas glanced at him, he had a whole, intact face. No bloody bisection anymore. "Dean, I'm an angel. I've always known."

For some reason, this shocked him. "What?"

"I know what you think is secret. I know you like killing demons. I know you think you're broken, and you drink to feel something. I know you slept with a gun under your pillow for an entire month in 1998, not because you were preparing for trouble, but because you'd look at it every night and wonder if you could finally pull the trigger. I know you, Dean. Angels see you for who you are, not what you want people to think you are."

Dean felt his gut roil. He really didn't want anyone – especially Cas – to know him that well. "I don't understand. You know I'm a piece of shit. Why are you here?"

"Because you're not. You try and you fail and you pick yourself up and you keep going. There's a beauty in that."

Dean snorted and looked away, because he couldn't look Cas in the eye right now. He wasn't sure he could look him in the eye ever again. "Yeah, everybody wants a fucked up Horseman on emotional training wheels. That sounds like a big win for the universe."

Cas was silent for a moment, as if not sure what to say. But maybe he was just thinking. "It took me a shockingly long time to realize that perfection isn't the point. There's no such thing. We all have flaws, scars on our souls, missing pieces. That isn't the point. The point is what we do in spite of those scars. We sin, we fall, we fail, we break down … it's okay. As long as we don't give up."

Dean looked back at the bar door, wondering if there was anything beyond it. "Save it for Hallmark, Shakespeare." But Cas probably knew he was blustering, just to pretend his words hadn't hit him in the gut.

"I'm not sure what holiday that sentiment would be appropriate for."

Dean laughed, and it felt good. "Cas, was that an actual joke?"

Cas smiled faintly. "See, I'm getting the hang of it."

Dean guessed that Cas must have also known how much he meant to him now. He thought of him as his other, weirder brother, although being weirder than Sam was a tall order. But Cas managed it easily. "You also thought my vessel was kind of handsome," Cas said.

"Pardon me?" Dean replied, although … yeah, okay, he did. But there was no denying Jimmy had been a good looking guy. Good enough looking that it was probably a shame he was such a religious nut in real life. But there was no fucking way he was putting all of his cards on the table, even if Cas knew what they were.

There was a noise, sort of a hollow roar, and Dean turned in time to see the bar's door and front wall ripped away. The void was there, a deep, endless well of nothingness. It couldn't have a will or intention, but somehow it did. Looking into all that nothingness made Dean dizzy. He felt like he was going to fall forward into it, and he would never stop falling.

Cas yanked him back and stepped in front of him, angel blade still in his hand. "You want him, you have to go through me first."

Dean felt like he'd been stomped through an emotional wringer, and he was done. Just done. Yes, it was terrifying, but what in his life hadn't been terrifying? One more nightmare didn't make a difference. "Fuck this noise," he said, grabbing his own angel blade from inside his coat, and standing shoulder to shoulder with Cas. "You want me so bad? Let's go." He would probably lose this battle, but right now he didn't care. He was going to take as much of that fucking thing with him as he could, make it bleed.

It was a void, so it was hard to say if there was any reaction at all. But it did seem to be growing larger, tearing away chunks of the bar and dissolving them like sugar in coffee.

(Nothing. Everything. Nothing. Eternal Pain.)

"Is this what it feels like to be a Winchester?" Cas asked.

Dean shrugged, as the void grew, and the pull of it became nearly irresistible. "Facing off against certain doom and knowing you're going to get your ass kicked? Basically."

To his surprise, Cas grinned. "It's pretty cool."

And then the emptiness swallowed them whole.


	10. Misfits and Mistakes

_**10 – Misfits and Mistakes**_

(Falling, falling forever -)

Dean had had just about enough of waking up in pools of blood. If only he could stop it.

When he had the strength to move, he pushed himself off the floor, and felt his gut tear. He gasped and put a hand to his stomach, only to feel warm blood gushing out of him. He wasn't sure if it was a gunshot wound or a stab wound; it was an opening that was making his blood drain out. He sat back against the wall, putting pressure on the wound, until he got an idea of where he was. He was back at Bobby's place, which was good, because he had buttloads of first aid stuff, but he was in Bobby's study, which didn't have that kind of thing. Had booze, though.

He managed to reach one of Bobby's hidden book flasks, and drank down all the warm whiskey inside. Not enough to numb him, but it was a start.

(- Everything is nothing, nothing is eternal - )

(- So fucking what?-)

Dean couldn't stand up yet, but he moved around until he found a rag and shoved it in the wound. Blindly opening a desk drawer, he felt around until he grabbed one of Bobby's many rolls of duct tape, and used his teeth to rip off strips. He then taped the wound as shut as he could possibly manage. He liked to call it battlefield surgery.

(- Claws digging deep, ripping into his soul, shredding it like hellhounds -)

He used the desk to help him stand up, and despite the tape, he held on to the wound like he might accidentally spill all his guts out if he wasn't careful. They managed to stay in this time.

( - grabbing on to something, punching through solid dark, feeling needle teeth slide into his skin -)

Dean found more stashed booze, and gulped it down. He didn't know what it was, it tasted like grade A rocket fuel, but he was glad to have it right now. Where had he been? He was getting these fragments, images, but they weren't connected. They almost told a story, but he couldn't quite put it together. They were just smash cuts of sinister things, things he was probably better off not remembering.

( - Cas was swallowed by the darkness, pulled under, he couldn't reach him, the darkness was pulling him in, he couldn't pull himself out -)

Was he alone here? He wasn't sure. "Anybody here?" he shouted.

( - angelic light erupted through the void, almost too bright to bear, the void screamed and recoiled, and Dean felt his arm rip from its socket, muscles snapping like twine -)

He looked to make sure his left arm was still attached. It was. So was his right. It felt like it had happened, but he was still relatively intact. Maybe it was … a dream or something. A hallucination.

( - Dean yanked himself free, blood gushing from his shoulder socket, but he reached into the darkness with his remaining hand, grabbed a handful of guts, and pulled. If they took part of him, he was taking a part of them -)

For a second he thought he saw black blood on his hands, but no, it was plain old red blood from his seeping gut wound. The rag and duct tape were holding so far.

(- a voice from the void, 'Why are you still alive?' -)

"Cas?" Dean staggered out of the study, lurching into the living room. If that happened, if the void tore chunks out of him, Cas could be the only reason he was still breathing. But the fact that he still had a gut wound indicated he couldn't finish the job. He had to do his own battlefield surgery, because he wasn't strong enough. Was he even still alive?

(-'Because you're not gonna kill me, you evil son of a bitch!'-)

"Cas?" Dean stopped at Bobby's makeshift bar to top himself off with a healthy slug of vodka. It burned going down, and it felt like he was swallowing glass. Yeah, he was pretty fucked up.

"There's no need to yell," Cas said weakly. He was slumped on the couch – where he hadn't been a second before - dressed in a black suit with a shirt that was half white and half black with dark blood. His trench coat was heaped on the floor, marinating in its own pool of black blood. His tie was pulled out and askew, and his hair was ruffled. He'd looked like he'd had one of those Vegas weekends where you wake up in a parking lot and can't remember the last two days, or how you got that tattoo on your ass. Except there usually wasn't so much ichor involved.

"Are you all right?"

"I'm not completely sure."

Well, at least he was being honest. Dean held up the bottle. "Want some?"

Cas shook his head.

"I don't remember a lot of what happened. It was nasty, right?"

"It wasn't pretty."

"Did we win?" Dean was partially joking.

"I don't know."

Wow. So not comforting. Dean sat down, but kept a hold of the bottle, because he still wasn't numb yet. "But we're back at Bobby's. Is that a good sign or a bad sign?"

"I don't know."

Dean considered a snarky remark, but discarded it. Cas's memory might be as fragmented as his. He had a little more vodka for courage before pressing onward. "Did I really have my arm torn off?"

Cas looked at him. He had dark circles under his eyes, emphasizing how pale he was. "You remember that?"

"It's hard to forget being disarmed." Okay, yeah, it was a terrible joke, but he had to make it.

"I didn't much care for it either."

Dean pondered that a moment. "You got an arm ripped off too?"

"If I had a true physical form I wouldn't be alive right now."

"Well… fun." No wonder he looked so rough. "What was the point of it? The void?"

"I can't answer that question."

"What about the voice asking me why I wasn't dead yet?"

Cas canted his head towards him. "What? The void spoke to you?"

"It didn't speak to you?"

"Not that I recall. What did it say?"

"It asked why I was still alive."

Cas sat forward, resting his head in his hands. From his posture alone, Dean guessed this wasn't a good sign. "They're still expecting you to die."

"A lot of people expect me to die. I've disappointed a lot of them. And some not so much."

Cas let out a strangely heavy sigh. "This isn't good. There may be no way out."

Dean snorted, looking around for better alcohol. "Well, I'm used to that. It feels like my whole life has been a bunch of dead end scenarios."

Suddenly bright light flooded the room, blaring through the windows like someone had put a battery of spotlights on full blast. You could feel the thrum of energy through the walls and floors. Cas stood, barely squinting at the light, and approached the closest window. Dean tried to follow him with his eyes, but couldn't. The light burned like acid. "What the hell is this?" Dean asked.

"I don't know," Cas said. But there was just a sliver of awe in his voice.

The light was bursting through the seams of the floor, crawling up the wall, dissolving everything in its path. Dean had to cover his eyes, because the light was unbearable. He could feel his retinas burning up.

A shadow fell over him, protecting him from the light, and no shock it was Cas. "I don't think we have a lot of time. I know you don't think so, but demons exist for a reason. There's a balance to the universe. There are rules."

"Why are you telling me this?" Dean squinted up at him, and the light was just so corrosive it looked like a line of it was running down the center of Cas's face.

"You're part of something now. You can't lone wolf it all the time. Do you understand?"

"Yeah, Cas, I get it. Why are you telling me this?"

He smiled, and another seam of light cracked down his face. Suddenly Dean realized it wasn't just his face. He had bleeding lines of light crawling down his chest, his arms and legs. It was like his angelic energy couldn't contain itself in a Human form any longer. "It's happening."

It took Dean a moment to understand what he was saying. "Ascension?" He felt idiotic for even saying it aloud. No, a make over. Why had they been going through this hell for … months? It felt like months. But time was different in Heaven, just like it was in Hell.

Cas smiled, and a few more pinholes of light punched through his face. He was becoming too painful to look at. "Angels are not in your purview. They fall to a higher authority."

"Why are –" And then he finally understood. "No. What did you do?"

Cas was veined in luminescence. He was now more light than Human. "Save them, Dean. Save the world."

"Don't leave me here, you bastard!" He jumped to his feet, not sure what he intended to do – something, anything – but then Cas exploded in brilliant white light, burning his eyes completely out of his skull .

* * *

The Darkness was trying to smother everyone. It was late afternoon, and it was pitch black. The Darkness was choking the sky, and the last time Sam had been able to truly see, the black clouds of it looked stacked at least two or three miles up. It was a static tornado, waiting to release its true fury.

Sam didn't need to breathe, so he was good, but anything alive and breathing on the ground was in serious trouble. He had to crawl, as the pressure of it was crushing. It wasn't hurting him right now, as far as he could tell – being dead was as numb as you were ever going to be - but he got a sense it wasn't happy. It was working up to something.

Sam knew what in an instant.

He felt something grab his ankle, and all of the sudden he was in the air, falling up. It was like gravity had been reversed and he was plummeting into the sky. If he could see the ground he'd probably be terrified, but it was all one big black mass of Darkness, and the only thing he really had was a disorienting sense of speed. Finally, it had figured out he was up to nothing good.

He could feel them, ghostly hands, and whispered half-words that almost made sense, but the only word he could genuinely make out was the repeated one "Ours." Weird how such a normally innocuous word could seem so deeply creepy.

What the Darkness didn't know was Sam had been hanging on to his secret weapon since the clouds started coming in thick. Even though he was racing for the troposphere, he still had it in his fist.

"Ours."

"Eat me," Sam said, and snapped the shard in half.

Even though he was dead, he felt the death shockwave that emanated from the shard. It was like a gust of Arctic air that promised instantaneous frostbite. He could even watch the shockwave as it moved through the Darkness, turning it into instant ash as it flowed outward. It started raining down, and after a brief millisecond of what seemed like weightlessness, Sam began falling down as well.

It was hard to say, but now that he could see the ground, he guessed he was about a mile up, and now he was plunging back to the Earth at breakneck speeds. He was dead, but he was as liable to shatter on impact as anything dropped from a great height.

Oh man, this was going to suck.


	11. Back In Black

_**11 – Back In Black**_

Sam looked out at the pond, and tried to remember when he had ever seen this place. When he was five maybe?

He was standing on a back porch that looked kind of rickety, but you couldn't argue with the view. A placid blue-gray oval of water, a couple of ducks bobbing on the surface, with scattered clots of willows and aspens arranged around the perimeter. This was some hunter's home, wasn't it? A friend of their dad's. Sam couldn't recall any of the finer details, just this peaceful view, which was so unlike the motels and truck stops and other random places that made up his scattered childhood.

"Hey Sammy," Dean said.

He turned to find Dean standing there, but he knew somehow this was Dean and yet not Dean. What was the giveaway? Maybe it was the fact that he had a small hand scythe hanging off his belt. "Is it really you?"

Dean shrugged. "More or less."

Sam hugged him, even though he knew real Dean would hate it. Still, Dean hugged him in return. For a second. Then he gave him the manly pat on the back that let him know Dean wanted out of this right this moment. Sam almost didn't oblige him.

Angels could walk through dreams. If Dean was really here, and this wasn't just wish fulfillment on his part, he made it. He survived Ascension.

Sam sat down on one of the porch steps, and Dean sat down beside him. "Oh, hey, I remember this place. Miguel's, right?"

"I don't remember. All I remember is the view."

"Yeah. Most of the pastoral stuff we saw had monsters in it."

They just sat for a long moment in silence, enjoying the setting, and avoiding reality. Then, Sam finally couldn't stand it anymore. "So you're a Horseman."

"Angel of Death, yeah. Seems inevitable, now that I think about it."

"That's not fair."

Dean glanced at him, and gave him a sly but still kind of sad half smile. Usually Sam saw it before Dean said something really dickish. "I appreciate it, but yeah, it really is. I've always been very good at killing things."

"We both are. Dad taught us well."

"Yeah, but you never had the taste for it like I did. When we were kids I thought that made you weak. I've grown up since then."

"I'd hope so, old man."

Dean had a beer in his hand, because of course he did, and took a gulp. "You say that now, but wait for a thousand years. Then I'll really be decrepit."

"Does Death age?"

He shrugged. "Probably not. I have a feeling I could look however I wanted. I could probably look like Adrienne Barbeau."

Now he knew it was the same old Dean. He just made a baffling reference. It was both heartening and a little sad to realize it was indeed his brother, no longer a member of the Human race. "Who?"

"'70's actress. You know, she was in The Fog, she had these … never mind."

Sam just let that one go. It was usually for the best. "What was it like?"

"Ascension? I don't remember a lot of it. What I do remember … wasn't pretty."

"How's Cas?"

Dean sighed, and started picking at the label on his beer bottle. That almost told Sam everything he needed to know. "Still missing. Hannah believes he may have sacrificed himself to jump start the whole thing. And oh man, Cas thought he had some haters in Heaven before. There is a faction that is totally pissed at him for allowing a lowly Human to Ascend, 'cause they think it sets a bad precedent. Ain't much they can do about it though, 'cause I'm Death. I can't kill them, but they can't kill me either. Stalemate."

"Missing's not dead though, right?"

"Right, and that's the one thing that gives me hope. Heaven knows what happens to its angels. The fact that they don't know in this case is kind of a good sign." Sam nodded, and decided to accept that. What was truly weird was Dean using the word hope and meaning it. "How did it go fighting the Darkness?"

Sam shrugged. "Just another apocalypse battle. They tried to turn me into sidewalk pizza by dropping me from a mile up."

"Fuck. What was that like?"

"No idea. Hannah got me right before I hit the ground."

Dean smiled, looking at the pond. "I totally get why Cas liked her. Likes her." He took another pull from his bottle, trying to pretend he hadn't screwed up the tense. Sam let him have it. "But the Belial thing worked?"

"Like a charm. I might as well have detonated a briefcase nuke." Suddenly it occurred to Sam he hadn't slept or felt the urge to sleep since he was dead. "Am I alive?"

"You're welcome."

Sam scoffed, shaking his head. "What's it like for you, being an Angel of Death?"

"Oh crap." Dean put the bottle down with a slight clunk. "I feel everything. I mean, everything. Plants, animals, insects, you name it. If it's alive, it's on my sense network. I think that includes aliens too. By the way, there are aliens."

Sam grinned, trying to imagine Dean, the man who wanted so desperately to be as emotionless as possible, suddenly being inundated with the stuff. That was either karma or irony, depending on who you asked. "None here, I hope."

"Oh no. Faster than light travel is either still Star Trek stuff, or they're avoiding humanity which, let's face it, is probably a good call."

"Especially now."

Dean picked up his bottle again. It looked full, which would be impossible, except apparently that wasn't true for an Angel of Death. "People still freakin' out, huh?"

"Yeah. There's a rise in weird cults and religious fanaticism, which is troubling." Everybody now knew supernatural things existed. It was impossible to get that genie back in the bottle, especially since armies of Hell chased hordes of rampaging Darkness through the streets of Beijing and Moscow. Maybe nobody's camera phones or the internet didn't work at the time, but some people had old film cameras (most of the shots were blurred or damaged, but some came through), and once the Darkness was banished and everything came back on, people talked. The world hadn't been ready for a monster explosion, but they got it anyway. "By the way, I'm not sure Crowley is giving all those possessed people back."

Dean raised an eyebrow at him. "He is now. I paid him a little visit before I came to see you. I let him know he was giving those people back, or I was taking his demons. All of them. Let's see him run Hell with three guys and a janitor."

Sam laughed, and wished he could have been there to see that. "I bet he just about shit a brick seeing you as the new Horseman."

"Oh hell yeah. He was sure I wouldn't make it. Actually, I think Cas was the only one bettin' on me."

"Don't forget me," Sam said.

"Well, you had to. You're my brother."

They sat in companionable silence for another few seconds, and Sam was aware he felt both happy and sad. Happy because Dean was still very clearly Dean. No angel could successfully fake the weirdness of his brother. But sad, because he wasn't really his Dean anymore. He was another kind of being altogether. Maybe it hadn't fundamentally changed him yet, but it might eventually. And he had a long time of eventually, because wasn't he immortal now? Barring another supernatural being grabbing his scythe and using it on him.

"You still at the Bunker?" Dean finally asked.

Sam nodded. "Why?"

"'Cause I'm bringing someone back, and they're going to be disoriented. They could probably use a friendly face to get 'em back up to speed."

"Who?"

"Charlie. She was just at the cut off point between revival and turning into a zombie, so I got in under the wire."

Sam sighed in relief. "Oh thank God. Or should I say you now?"

Dean ignored that. "She didn't deserve to die for me, or for us."

"No, she didn't." Nobody did, but that was probably a given at this point.

Dean reached into his coat pocket, and pulled out a piece of paper, which had a weird symbol on it. It looked Enochian, and seemed to be angular marks inside a crescent moon shape … which looked like a scythe, now that Sam thought about it. "Okay, you ever wanna summon me, just draw this and splash some blood on it. Doesn't matter what kind, and just a drop'll do. I'll be right there."

"There's a death summoning sigil?" This was news to Sam. He studied it for a moment, memorizing it, and then tucked it in his own pocket. It might actually be there when he woke up. Angel stuff was crazy.

"It's Heaven's best kept secret. I'm not really supposed to spend much time on Earth, 'cause portents happen and stuff like that, but if you ever need me, I'm there."

Sam nodded. "I know. You usually are."

Dean smiled at him and looked away before it got too icky. He was taking another gulp from his endlessly refilling beer bottle when he cocked his head in a very angel like way. "Hannah's calling me," he said.

Sam heard nothing, but he wouldn't. He wasn't part of that network. "Better get going. I'd hate for you to get fired."

Dean scowled at him. "Hey, I'm Death. Don't you sass me."

Sam smiled at this, and Dean stood, abandoning his beer bottle. "See you around, Dean."

Dean put a hand on his shoulder and gave it a comforting squeeze. "You're free now, kid. You don't have to do the whole Winchester thing anymore. Go live your life and enjoy it, okay? There's a whole new world of Hunters now. Let them have it."

Before Sam could say anything, Dean was gone in the faintest sound of ruffled wings. He picked up his beer, and felt a couple of tears gathering in his eyes. He was going to miss Dean, but he was right.

It was a whole new world.

* * *

Dean still wasn't quite used to willing himself places, but it was so damn cool he just wanted to do it all the time. Now he knew why Cas came and went so abruptly. It was fun! But did he know that? Angels never seemed to be a naturally fun bunch.

He went from Sam's dream to Hannah's ice blue office with a single step, and he felt the change in energy right away. Not only was she not alone, but she was with a major powerhouse, one of the upper echelon angels.

Which was why it was such a shock to see it was Cas.

"You're back!" he said stupidly. Of course he was back! Goddamn, how could he be turned into an angel of death and still remain kind of dumb?

But Cas not only smiled, he hugged him. "And you made it."

Two hugs in one day. This was really weird. But as he patted Cas on the back and tried to subtly push him away, Dean saw the shadow of his wings on the wall. Not only did he have two again, but they were huge. If they didn't have feathers, he'd have thought they were dragon wings.

Cas still looked like himself otherwise. Still wearing the Jimmy Novak guise, with the dark suit and trench coat, but he kept smiling, and it was weird. Dean finally pried him off, and asked, "What's up with you?" He glanced at Hannah, to see if she knew, but since she sent no thoughts his way, she waiting for Cas to tell him.

"I'm an Archangel."

Of all the things he expected, that wasn't one of them. "Aren't Archangels all warlord dicks? And dead?"

"He's a new kind," Hannah finally said. "It was decided there should be a better way."

Cas was smiling so broadly, it looked like his face was going to split in half. "He said he was proud of me, Dean."

He? But Dean knew, even as he thought about it. Accepting that there was a God was going to be the hardest thing about all this.

He hoped he never met him, because after all he and Sam and Cas and the Earth in general had been through, Dean was pretty sure he'd try to kill him.

* * *

Two Months Later

"Come on, I can get us a great price on business class tickets," Charlie said, holding out her laptop. "We need to go get them before someone else does."

Sam sighed, looking at the news article she'd called up on her screen. It was from a British news service, reporting about some strange stone tablets that had recently been uncovered in Scotland, in "never before seen writing". The problem was, that writing looked like a sloppy Enochian to both Sam and Charlie, although the photos with the article weren't the greatest resolution. "I thought we were slowing down on the whole hunting thing."

"This isn't hunting," she replied crisply. "This is gathering."

He rolled his eyes at the weak joke, and looked away so she wouldn't catch him smiling. Once Charlie got accustomed to being alive again, which didn't take long, she'd moved into the Bunker temporarily, at least until she could find more permanent accommodation. But somehow she and Sam had slid into working the whole Men of Letters thing (or as she rightly called it, Person of Letters) again, and they had it up and running as an information hub for the Hunters. With her help, he'd been able to totally digitize the archives, although some of it was still off limits, stored on a server that could only be accessed physically within the Bunker itself. While it was nice to have a back up copy of all these books and letters, they weren't crazy.

They never intended to hunt together. It was just that one time, when some desperate werewolves bikers rolled through a nearby town, and they were the closest to the place. Then there was the demon serial killer. And that shapeshifter. So they'd ended up doing it a few times, and Sam hated to admit it, but it was kind of fun. He and Charlie clicked on a whole different wavelength than he and Dean had, although it probably helped that they weren't family, and they spoke the same geeky language. He imagined he and Charlie could probably have a nice, sexless marriage together, if they ever wanted to throw their lives away like that. (He could almost hear Dean in his head snarking, _"Wouldn't all marriages involving you be sexless, Sam?"_ )

He'd began making baby steps towards having a normal life. He'd just started renting a small place in town, not far from the Bunker, and he was thinking of adopting a dog. Sam knew he'd eventually get to the point where he would never want to hunt again, so he felt like he was getting it out of his system now. In his head, there was a sort of division – the time before the world knew (and Dean became Death), and the time after. While the world was technically more chaotic, with people still not adjusting well to the uncanny, there seemed to be less demonic horrors. Charlie had once remarked, "I bet they're scared of Dean." And he wondered that himself. Word had gotten around about Dean's new role, and the general reaction of the demon community had been shock and horror. A Winchester as the Horseman of Death was the worst thing they could think of.

Sam still had the sigil. He'd even shared it with Charlie, on the off chance she ever needed Dean to show up and wipe out a town on her behalf, but they'd never used it yet. Sometimes Dean would stroll by one of his dreams, have a chat, but Sam was never sure if they actually occurred, or were just in fact dreams.

They were sitting outside on the lawn, close to the Bunker. It seemed to be weird working down there on such a nice day, so he and Charlie had packed up their laptops and some snacks, and came out to enjoy the view. It was easy to forget the world wasn't all dark and horrible when you were working underground all the time.

Sam knew they should just go to Edinburgh and get the tablets, in case they turned out to be something really bad, but his train of thought was interrupted by the soft sound of rustling wings. "Cas!" Charlie exclaimed, climbing to her feet and engulfing the new Archangel Castiel in a bear hug. Rather than be awkward about it, he hugged her back, smiling. "It's so fun to hug you," she told him. "It's like a spa day."

She wasn't kidding. This version of Cas may have been even more powered than previous versions, but he also radiated a kind of remarkable peace that made you want to stay in his presence. He seemed happy, which was weird given all that had happened, but that was Cas for you. Besides, when you thought about it, it all made sense. It wasn't only Dean who Ascended.

"It's nice to see you too, Charlie," Cas told her, holding her at arm's length. He then looked past her at Sam, and he sighed and put the laptop aside. Cas did visit casually, but not much anymore.

Sam didn't want to say Cas was functioning as Dean's minder, but he totally was. Having ridden shotgun with Dean for so long, Sam knew that was kind of a shit job, but Cas never complained. "How are things with Dean?"

"Good. But that's why I'm here. If you get any reports about ominous portents around Hidalgo del Parral, Mexico, you can ignore them."

Sam checked his phone, and found it mentioned in his notes. He immediately deleted it. "Dean?"

Cas grimaced slightly. "It seems a girl who was destined to die two years from now showed up early, and Dean got angry and checked it out. It was a huge nest of vampires."

Sam wasn't surprised. It wasn't even the first time Dean had come to Earth to take out a monster threat on his own. He was keeping Heaven busy. "How many?"

Cas thought about it a moment. His eyes looked clearer nowadays, as if partially translucent. But that was the only physical change, beyond his wings. He still appeared to be the same old Cas, just more powerful, and more at peace, than ever. "About two dozen. By the time I got there, Dean had already killed half, and was taunting the rest for picking a fight with Death."

Charlie snorted a laugh. Sam rolled his eyes. Yep, that was Dean all right.

"I took out the rest and got him back to Heaven."

Sam raised an eyebrow. "You?"

Cas shrugged. "I only needed to show them my light. They're vampires."

Maybe Dean had gotten himself a new (old) hunting buddy too. Good for him. "Thanks for the head's up."

"Of course. I like having an excuse to come to Earth." Cas looked around, still smiling. "In spite of everything, it's still beautiful."

"You haven't been to Omaha lately, have you?" Charlie asked.

Sam got up to shake Cas's hand. Hugging him seemed a bit too familiar for an Archangel, although he suspected Cas wouldn't actually mind. When he did, Cas met his eyes, and said, under his breath, "It's okay, Sam, He'll never be alone. I'll make sure of it."

He felt a cold spike in his stomach. So he knew that was bothering him, huh? Sam did worry about Dean. Not so much now, but what happened fifty years down the road, or a hundred, when everybody he knew was dead? Except Cas. Cas would be the constant, whether he liked it or not.

Cas gave him a beatific smile. "Why wouldn't I like it? Dean's the best friend I've ever had."

"Get back to me after twenty years, see if you still feel that way," Sam said, although he knew Cas meant it. Cas had always loved Dean, in one way or another. He wasn't going to stop now.

"Hey Cas, you don't happen to know what these are, do you?" Charlie said, showing him the picture of the tablets.

He studied them a moment, not seeming very concerned. "These might be the lost tablets of an 18th century prophet named Mary Gallagher. Her gift was taken the wrong way by the British, and she was hung as a witch."

Charlie shook her head in disgust. "The patriarchy, always putting women down."

"The tablets probably aren't dangerous, but they may have useful information on them."

"Okay," Sam sighed, knowing when he was beaten. "We'll go to Scotland."

Charlie made a small noise of triumph, and started searching for plane tickets.

"If you need help translating, just let me know," Cas offered.

Sam nodded. "Take care of yourself," Sam said.

Cas gave him a small salute, an irreverent gesture of a kind he actually did nowadays, and disappeared in the faintest ruffling of wings.

"Okay, I got us booked on a flight out tonight," Charlie announced. "We're brother and sister Dan and Nancy Wilson, and we're in business class, 'cause first class was ridiculous."

"Perfect."

"Dibs on the cutest flight attendant."

"No," Sam replied reflexively. "You got dibs last time."

"Yeah, but she was straight. I get a do-over."

Sam was going to protest, but what was he protesting exactly? He ended up shaking his head in disgust. "Don't turn into a female Dean on me."

She scoffed. "As if. I have better dress sense, for one thing."

"That's not difficult," Sam replied, smiling.

It was a brand new world all right. But some things never changed.

* * *

The End


End file.
